What had passed in that carriage on the homeward drive? No one knows—no one will ever know. Oh, May! oh, my dear!
Before a week was over they laid her beside her husband in our little churchyard on the thyme-covered hill—the churchyard where they had kept their love-trysts.
Thus was accomplished John Charrington's wedding.
UNCLE ABRAHAM'S ROMANCE.
"No, my dear," my Uncle Abraham answered me, "no—nothing romantic ever happened to me—unless—but no: that wasn't romantic either——"
I was. To me, I being eighteen, romance was the world. My Uncle Abraham was old and lame. I followed the gaze of his faded eyes, and my own rested on a miniature that hung at his elbow-chair's right hand, a portrait of a woman, whose loveliness even the miniature-painter's art had been powerless to disguise—a woman with large lustrous eyes and perfect oval face.
I rose to look at it. I had looked at it a hundred times. Often enough in my baby days I had asked, "Who's that, uncle?" always receiving the same answer: "A lady who died long ago, my dear."
As I looked again at the picture, I asked, "Was she like this?"
"Who?"