They drove lazily, on summer noons, through leafy fastnesses and cool forest paths; or sat idly by some little stream on the fresh, green moss, with a line dancing on the crystal water, amusing themselves by the fiction that it was fishing upon which they were intent, and not the dear delight of watching one another's faces reflected from the placid stream.

They spent hours at home, reading bits of poems, or singing scraps of love-songs, talking a little, and then falling away into silence; or she sat perched on his knee or the elbow of his chair, smoothing his sunny hair, stroking his long, silky mustache, or looking into his answering eyes, till the world lapsed quite away from them, and they thought themselves in heaven.
An idle, happy time! a time to make a worker sigh only to behold, and a Benthamite lift his hands in deprecation and despair.

A time which would not last, because it could not, any more than apple-blossoms and May flowers, but which was sweet and fragrant past all describing while it endured.
Some _kindly_ disposed person sent Surrey a city paper with an item marked in such wise as to make him understand its unpleasant import without the reading.

"Come," he said, "we will have none of this; this owl does not belong to our sunshine,"-- and so destroyed and forgot it.
Others, however, saw that which he scorned to read.

He had not been into the city since he called at his father's house, and walked into the reception room of his aunt, and been refused interview or speech at either place.