somebody I liked better or I might not care about being married at all, you know; so we will leave it open until I am eighteen and a half!"
"And it is a promise?" he says, holding my hand between both his own, and looking very kindly into my face. (How his mother would have loved him if she had lived, he has such lovable ways.) "You will not forget?"
"No," I say promptly, "I always keep my promises: ask Jack if I do not—that is one reason why he says I ought to have been a boy! But look, how dusk it is growing! I must go. Good-night!"
"Good-night," he says, standing over me, tall and fair in the gathering shadows. "Perhaps this is the last time I shall have a chance of speaking to you alone before you go, dear?"
"I suppose so."
"Then, Nell, as you're going to be my little wife some day, and as I have no sister, you know—nobody to be good to me, won't you give me a kiss, just a little one, before you go?"
"Of course I will!" I say, touched to the heart by the allusion to his narrow, loveless home life; then, as he stoops his head, I lift myself on tiptoe and kiss his cheek as heartily as though it were Jack's. "I wish you were my brother," I say warmly—"I do wish it with all my heart!"
CHAPTER XIII.
"Virtue! a fig! 'Tis ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens to the which our wills are gardeners . . . . either to have it sterile with idleness, or manured with industry; why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills."
The morning of my departure has arrived. The carriage is at the door, my boxes are on the roof, and if anything could console me
