from his brother-in-law's gun that autumn. Gilbert found it a great deal
pleasanter to spend his mornings dawdling in the little cottage
drawing-room or under the walnut-trees with Marian, than to waste his
noontide hours in the endeavour to fill a creditable game-bag. There is
not very much to tell of the hours which those two spent together so
happily. It was an innocent, frivolous, useless employment of time, and
left little trace behind it, except in the heart of one of those two.
Gilbert wondered at himself when, in some sober interval of reflection,
he happened to consider those idle mornings, those tranquil uneventful
afternoons and evenings, remembering what a devoted man of business he
had once been, and how a few months ago he would have denounced such a
life in another.

"Well," he said to himself, with a happy laugh, "a man can take this
fever but once in his life, and it is only wise in him to surrender
himself utterly to the divine delirium. I shall have no excuse for
neglecting business by-and-by, when my little wife and I are settled down
together for the rest of our days. Let me be her lover while I may. Can I
ever be less than her lover, I wonder? Will marriage, or custom, or the
assurance that we belong to each other for the rest of our days, take the
poetry out of our lives? I think not; I think Marian must always be to me
what she has seemed to me from the very first--something better and
brighter than the common things of this life."

Custom, which made Marian Nowell dearer to Gilbert Fenton every day, had
by this time familiarised her with his position as her future husband.
She was no longer surprised or distressed when he pleaded for a short
engagement, and a speedy realization of that Utopian home which they were
to inhabit together. The knowledge of her uncle's delight in this
engagement of hers might have reconciled her to it, even if she had not