Page:E Nesbit - The Literary Sense.djvu/308

296 list and—" He caught her in his arms there in the street. "No; you can't get away. I'm wiser than I was three years ago. I shall never let you go any more, my dear."

The girl from the sixth looked quite resentfully at the two faces that met her at the station. It seemed hardly natural or correct for a classical mistress to look so happy.

Elizabeth's lover schemed for and got a good-night word with her at the top of the stairs, by the table where the beautiful brass candle-sticks lay waiting in shining rows.

"Sleep well, you poor, tired little person," he said, as he lighted the candle; "such little feet, such wicked little shoes, such a long, long, long walk."

"You must be tired, too," she said.

"Tired? with eleven miles, and your hand against my heart for eight of them? I shall remember that walk when we're two happy old people nodding across our own hearthrug at each other."

So he had felt it too; and if he had been married, how wicked it would have been! But he was not married—yet.