Love—­this kind of love of which I speak—­is a wonderful thing, the most wonderful thing in all the world.  The strength it gives, the brightness, the actual happiness, even in hardest times, is often quite miraculous.  When Hilary sat waiting in the jeweler’s shop, she watched a little episode of high life—­two wealthy people choosing their marriage plate; the bride, so careless and haughty; the bridegroom, so unutterably mean to look at, stamped with that innate smallness and coarseness of soul which his fine clothes only made more apparent.  And she thought—­oh, how fondly she thought!—­of that honest, manly mein; of that true, untainted heart, which she felt sure, had never loved any woman but herself; of the warm, firm hand, carving its way thro’ the world for her sake, and waiting patiently till it could openly clasp hers, and give her every thing it had won.  She would not have exchanged him.  Robert Lyon, with his penniless love, his half-hopeless fortunes, or maybe his lot of never ending care, for the “brawest bridegroom” under the sun.

Under this sun—­the common, everyday winter sun of Regent and Oxford streets—­she walked now as brightly and bravely as if there were no trouble before her, no painful meeting with Ascott, no horrid humiliation from which every womanly feeling in her nature shrunk with acute pain.  “Robert, my Robert!” she whispered in her heart, and felt him so near to her that she was at rest, she hardly knew why.

Possibly grand, or clever, or happy people who condescend to read this story may despise it, think it unideal, uninteresting; treating of small things and common people—­“poor persons,” in short.  I can not help it.  I write for the poor; not to excite the compassion of the rich toward them, but to show them their own dignity and the bright side of their poverty.  For it has its bright side; and its very darkest, when no sin is mixed up therewith, is brighter than many an outwardly prosperous life.

“Better is a dinner of herbs, where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.  Better is a dry morsel, and quietness therewith, than a house full of sacrifices and strife.”

With these two sage proverbs—­which all acknowledge and scarcely any really believe, or surely they would act a little more as if they did—­I leave Johanna Leaf sitting silently in her solitary parlor, knitting stockings for her child; weaving many a mingled web of thought withal, yet never letting a stitch go down; and Hilary Leaf walking cheerily and fearlessly up one strange street and down another to find out the “bad” place, where she once had no idea it would ever have been her lot to go.—­One thing she knew, and gloried in the knowledge, that if Robert Lyon had known she was going, or known half the cares she had to meet, he would have recrossed the Indian seas—­have risked fortune, competence, hope of the future, which was the only cheer of his hard present—­in order to save her from them all.