the eye, I could also love with a yet deeper love that which would speak
to my imagination,--Intellect, Genius, Fame! Ah, these have an immortal
youth and imperishable beauty of their own!"

"You are a very strange girl."

"But we are on a very strange subject--it is all an enigma!" said
Evelyn, shaking her wise little head with a pretty gravity, half mock,
half real. "Ah, if Lord Vargrave should love you--and you--oh, you
_would_ love him, and then I should be free, and so happy!"

They were then on the lawn in sight of the cottage windows, and Lumley,
lifting his eyes from the newspaper, which had just arrived and been
seized with all a politician's avidity, saw them in the distance. He
threw down the paper, mused a moment or two, then took up his hat and
joined them; but before he did so, he surveyed himself in the glass. "I
think I look young enough still," thought he.

"Two cherries on one stalk," said Lumley, gayly: "by the by, it is not a
complimentary simile. What young lady would be like a cherry?--such an
uninteresting, common, charity-boy sort of fruit. For my part, I always
associate cherries with the image of a young gentleman in corduroys and a
skeleton jacket, with one pocket full of marbles, and the other full of
worms for fishing, with three-halfpence in the left paw, and two cherries
on one stalk (Helena and Hermia) in the right."

"How droll you are!" said Caroline, laughing.

"Much obliged to you, and don't envy your discrimination, 'Melancholy
marks me for its own.' You ladies,--ah, yours is the life for gay spirits