Page:Cuthbert Bede--Little Mr Bouncer and Tales of College Life.djvu/277

Rh a book dropped from her hand and fell under the wheel. I picked it up and returned it to her. With the old gentleman I interchanged a salutation of hats, with the young lady I interchanged a mere glance. But what will not a glance effect when one is yet a child in the eyes of the law, and when the thermometer is at 90 in the shade? From that moment, I was that young lady's slave.

With another glance, and we had passed side by side into our respective doorways, and I had only the lovely vision of her features to console me. Eating dinner under such circumstances was a mockery and a jest; I went through the ceremony merely as a solemn duty which I owed to custom and to my family. I was glad when I was able to get away on to the beach, and meditate by moonlight on the fair unknown. How her features were impressed on my mind, though I had seen her but for a few seconds! But there are some faces to be met with once or twice in a life-time, which can never be forgotten, but which will rise in all their freshness and beauty before the charmed spell of memory, without any effort or will of our own to call up the several features. And so it was with the lady of my tale. I can see her before me now—"in my mind's eye, Horatio"—as distinctly as I could in my lover's fancy when I walked that night on the sea-beach at Westcliffe, and, according to my wont under great excitement, talked to my Skye-terrier Trap, on the subject that engrossed my thoughts. Trap was my college dog and constant companion—the recipient of all my secrets. If all depositors of secrets made a similarly wise selection in their confidantes, the Mrs. Candours of the world would find a greater part of their occupation gone!