the country-side could show. Now, being dark and fair respectively and
having lived in close association since childhood, Leonard and Jane, as
might be expected from the working of the laws of natural economy, had
gravitated towards each other with increasing speed ever since they had
come to understand the possibilities of the institution of marriage.
In the end thus mutual gravitation led to a shock and confusion of
individualities which was not without its charm; or, to put the matter
more plainly, Leonard proposed to Jane and had been accepted with many
blushes and some tears and kisses.

It was a common little romance enough, but, like everything else with
which youth and love are concerned, it had its elements of beauty. Such
affairs gain much from being the first in the series. Who is there among
us that does not adore his first love and his first poem? And yet when
we see them twenty years after!

Presently the Rectory door was opened and Leonard entered. At this
moment it occurred to him that he did not quite know why he had come. To
be altogether accurate, he knew why he had come well enough. It was to
see Jane, and arrive at an understanding with her father. Perhaps it
may be well to explain that his engagement to that young lady was of the
suppressed order. Her parents had no wish to suppress it, indeed; for
though Leonard was a younger son, it was well known that he was destined
to inherit his mother's fortune of fifty thousand pounds more or less.
Besides, Providence had decreed a delicate constitution to his elder and
only brother Thomas. But Sir Thomas Outram, their father, was reputed
to be an ambitious man who looked to see his sons marry well, and this
marriage would scarcely have been to Leonard's advantage from the family
lawyer point of view.