“But where are the—­the—­the young men?” asked Lily, assuming a look of mock astonishment.

“They’ll be across in two or three hours’ time,” said the squire.  “They both dressed for dinner, and, as I thought, made themselves very smart; but for such a grand occasion as this they thought a second dressing necessary.  How do you do, Mrs Hearn?  I hope you are quite well.  No rheumatism left, eh?” This the squire said very loud into Mrs Hearn’s ear.  Mrs Hearn was perhaps a little hard of hearing; but it was very little, and she hated to be thought deaf.  She did not, moreover, like to be thought rheumatic.  This the squire knew, and therefore his mode of address was not good-natured.

“You needn’t make me jump so, Mr Dale.  I’m pretty well now, thank ye.  I did have a twinge in the spring,—­that cottage is so badly built for draughts!  ‘I wonder you can live in it,’ my sister said to me the last time she was over.  I suppose I should be better off over with her at Hamersham, only one doesn’t like to move, you know, after living fifty years in one parish.”

“You mustn’t think of going away from us,” Mrs Boyce said, speaking by no means loud, but slowly and plainly, hoping thereby to flatter the old woman.  But the old woman understood it all.  “She’s a sly creature, is Mrs Boyce,” Mrs Hearn said to Mrs Dale, before the evening was out.  There are some old people whom it is very hard to flatter, and with whom it is, nevertheless, almost impossible to live unless you do flatter them.

At last the two heroes came in across the lawn at the drawing-room window; and Lily, as they entered, dropped a low curtsey before them, gently swelling down upon the ground with her light muslin dress, till she looked like some wondrous flower that had bloomed upon the carpet, and putting her two hands, with the backs of her fingers pressed together, on the buckle of her girdle, she said, “We are waiting upon your honours’ kind grace, and feel how much we owe to you for favouring our poor abode.”  And then she gently rose up again, smiling, oh, so sweetly, on the man she loved, and the puffings and swellings went out of her muslin.

I think there is nothing in the world so pretty as the conscious little tricks of love played off by a girl towards the man she loves, when she has made up her mind boldly that all the world may know that she has given herself away to him.

I am not sure that Crosbie liked it all as much as he should have done.  The bold assurance of her love when they two were alone together he did like.  What man does not like such assurances on such occasions?  But perhaps he would have been better pleased had Lily shown more reticence,—­been more secret, as it were, as to her feelings, when others were around them.  It was not that he accused her in his thoughts of any want of delicacy.  He read her character too well; was, if not quite aright in his reading of it, at least too nearly so to admit of his making