“To be your fellow
     You may deny me; but I’ll be your servant
     Whether you will or no.”

Hilary always contrived to make his supper herself.

Those pleasant days were now over.  Mr. Lyon was gone.  As she stool alone over the kitchen fire, she thought—­as now and then she let herself think for a minute or two in her busy prosaic life—­of that August night, standing at the front door, of his last “good-by,” and last hand-clasp, tight, warm, and firm; and somehow she, like Johanna, trusted in him.

Not exactly in his love; it seemed almost impossible that he should love her, at least till she grew much more worthy of him than now; but in himself, that he would never be less himself, less thoroughly good and true than now.  That, some time, he would be sure to come back again, and take up his old relations with them, brightening their dull life with his cheerfulness; infusing in their feminine household the new element of a clear, strong, energetic, manly will, which sometimes made Johanna say that instead of twenty-five the young man might be forty; and, above all, bringing into their poverty the silent sympathy of one who had fought his own battle with the world—­a hard one, too, as his face sometimes showed—­though he never said much about it.

Of the results of this pleasant relation—­whether she being the only truly marriageable person in the house.  Robert Lyon intended to marry her, or was expected to do so, or that society would think it a very odd thing if he did not do so—­this unsophisticated Hilary never thought at all.  If he had said to her that the present state of things was to go on forever; she to remain always Hilary Leaf, and he Robert Lyon, the faithful friend of the family, she would have smiled in his face and been perfectly satisfied.

True, she had never had any thing to drive away the smile from that innocent face; no vague jealousies aroused; no maddening rumors afloat in the small world that was his and theirs.  Mr. Lyon was grave and sedate in all his ways; he never paid the slightest attention to, or expressed the slightest interest in, any woman whatsoever.

And so this hapless girl loved, him—­just himself; without the slightest reference to his “connections,” for he had none; or his “prospects,” which, if he had any, she did not know of.  Alas! to practical and prudent people I can offer no excuse for her; except, perhaps what Shakspeare gives in the creation of the poor Miranda.

When the small servant re-entered the kitchen, Hilary, with a half sigh, shook off her dreams, called Ascott out of the school-room, and returned to the work-a-day world and the family supper.

This being ended, seasoned with a few quiet words administered to Ascott, and which on the whole he took pretty well, it was nearly ten o’clock.