"Yes; there'll be mother and Mary, of course. But I will come over here the very first day,—that is, if you'll care to see me?"
"We shall care to see you very much. You know that. And—dear John, I do hope you'll be happy."
There was a tone in her voice as she spoke which almost upset him; or, I should rather say, which almost put him up upon his legs and made him speak; but its ultimate effect was less powerful. "Do you?" said he, as he held her hand for a few happy seconds. "And I'm sure I hope you'll always be happy. Good-by, Lily." Then he left her, returning to the house, and she continued her walk, wandering down among the trees in the shrubbery, and not showing herself for the next half hour. How many girls have some such lover as that,—a lover who says no more to them than Johnny Eames then said to Lily Dale, who never says more than that? And yet when, in after years, they count over the names of all who have loved them, the name of that awkward youth is never forgotten.
That farewell had been spoken nearly two years since, and Lily Dale was then seventeen. Since that time, John Eames had been home once, and during his month's holiday had often visited Allington. But he had never improved upon that occasion of which I have told. It had seemed to him that Lily was colder to him than in old days, and he had become, if anything, more shy in his ways with her. He was to return to Guestwick again during this autumn; but, to tell honestly the truth in the matter, Lily Dale did not think or care very much for his coming. Girls of nineteen do not care for lovers of one-and-twenty, unless it be when the fruit has had the advantage of some forcing apparatus or southern wall.
John Eames's love was still as hot as ever, having been sustained on poetry, and kept alive, perhaps, by some close confidence in the ears of a brother clerk; but it is not to be supposed that during these two years he had been a melancholy lover. It might, perhaps, have been better for him had his disposition led him to that line of life. Such, however, had not been the case. He had already abandoned the flute on which he had learned to sound three sad notes before he left Guestwick, and, after the fifth or sixth Sunday, he had relinquished his solitary walks along the towing-path of the Regent's Park Canal. To think of one's absent love is very sweet; but it becomes monotonous after a mile or two of a towing-path, and the mind will turn away to Aunt Sally, the Cremorne Gardens, and financial questions. I doubt whether any girl would be satisfied with her lover's mind if she knew the whole of it.
"I say, Caudle, I wonder whether a fellow could get into a club?"
This proposition was made, on one of those Sunday walks, by John Eames to the friend of his bosom, a brother clerk, whose legitimate name was Cradell, and who was therefore called Caudle by his friends.
"Get into a club? Fisher in our room belongs to a club."
"That's only a chess-club. I mean a regular club."
"One of the swell ones at the West End?" said Cradell, almost lost in admiration at the ambition of his friend.