“You shall, sir,” said Mr. Cromwell.

About next morning Mr. Cromwell, who had often a cool fit after a hot one, and was a very big man, take him altogether, gave a different order.  “The fool thought he was doing his duty; turn him loose.”

The fool in question was so proud of his battered house that he left it standing there, bullets and all, and built him a house elsewhere.

King Charles the Second had not landed a month before he made him a baronet, and one tenant after another occupied a portion of the old mansion.  Two state-rooms were roofed and furnished with the relics of the entire mansion, and these two rooms the present baronet’s surveyor occupied at rare intervals when he was inspecting the large properties connected with the baronet’s estate.

Mary Bartley now occupied these two rooms, connected by folding-doors, and she sat pensive in the oriel-window of her bedroom.  Young ladies cling to their bedrooms, especially when they are pretty and airy.  Suddenly she heard a scurry and patter of a horse’s hoof, reined up at the side of the house.  She darted from the window and stood panting in the middle of the room.  The next minute Mrs. Easton entered the sitting-room all in a flutter, and beckoned her.  Mary flew to her.

“He is here.”

“I thought he would be.”

“Will you meet him down-stairs?”

“No, here.”

Mrs. Easton acquiesced, rapidly closed the folding-doors, and went out, saying, “Try and calm yourself, Miss Mary.”

Miss Mary tried to obey her, but Walter rushed in impetuously, pale, worn, agitated, yet enraptured at the first sight of her, and Mary threw herself round his neck in a moment, and he clasped her fluttering bosom to his beating heart, and this was the natural result of the restraint they had put upon a passionate affection:  for what says the dramatist Destouches, improving upon Horace, so that in England his immortal line is given to Moliere. “Chassez le naturel, il revient au galop.”

The next thing was, they held each other at arm’s-length, and mourned over each other.

“Oh, my poor Mary, how ill you look!”

“Oh, my poor Walter, how pale and worn!”

“It’s all my fault,” said Mary.

“No; it’s all mine,” said Walter.

And so they blamed themselves, and grieved over each other, and vowed that come what might they would never part again.  But, lo and behold!  Walter went on from that to say: 

“And that we may never part again let us marry at once, and put our happiness out of the reach of accidents.”

“What!” said Mary.  “Defy your father upon his dying bed.”

“Oh no,” said Walter, “that I could not do.  I mean marry secretly, and announce it after his decease, if I am to lose him.”

“And why not wait till after his decease?” said Mary.

“Because, then, the laws of society would compel us to wait six months, and in that six months some infernal obstacle or other would be sure to occur, and another would be sure to follow.  I am a great deal older than you, and I see that whoever procrastinates happiness, risks it; and whoever shilly-shallies with it deserves to lose it, and generally does.”