benefit to them all if Julia married Mr. Brotherton. He had said that it
should be so, and he was a gentleman of good estate, and as generous as
he was wealthy, though very middle-aged, a widower with six children,
and as a lover not interesting perhaps.

Mr. Cecil Burleigh also sat at an open window, but he was not provided
with a confessor, only with a cigar. He had dined, and did not feel so
intensely miserable as he felt an hour ago. "Dear little Julia!" He
thought of her with caressing tenderness, her pretty looks, her graceful
ways, her sweet affection. "There were tears in her dove's eyes when she
said 'Good-bye, Cecil, good-bye, dear!'" No other woman would ever have
his heart.

They had both good sense, and did not rail at evil fortune. It had done
neither any mischief to be absorbed in love of the other through the
most passionate years of their lives. Mrs. Gardiner had remonstrated
often and kindly against their folly, but had put no decisive _veto_ on
it, in the hope that they would grow out it. And, in a manner, they had
grown out of it. Six years ago, if they had been allowed, they would
have married without counting the cost; but those six years had brought
them experience of the world, of themselves, and of each other, and they
feared the venture. If Mr. Cecil Burleigh had been without ambition, his
secretaryship would have maintained them a modest home; but neither had
he a mind for the exclusive retired pleasures of the domestic hearth,
nor she the wish to forego the delights of society. There was no romance
in poverty for Julia Gardiner. It was too familiar; it signified to her
shifts, privations, expediencies, rude humiliations, and rebuffs. And
that was not the life for Mr. Cecil Burleigh. Their best friends said
so, and they acquiesced. From this it followed that the time was come
for them to part. Julia was twenty-four. The present opportunity of