These were the things he said to himself--or rather he said nothing to himself, but such were the gleams that flew across his mind like glimmers of light out of the sky. He went quickly up the steep hill, breasting it as if his fortune lay at the top, and a moment’s delay might risk it all--until he came within sight of Crockford’s cottage, its upper windows twinkling over the rugged bit of hedge that fenced off the little grass-plot in front. Then his pace slackened--the goal was in sight; there was no need for haste--in short, even had she been visible, Walter would have dallied, with that fantastic instinct of the lover which prolongs by deferring the moment of enjoyment. And then at a little distance he could examine the windows, he could watch for some sign or token of her, as he could not do near at hand. He lingered, he stood still on a pretense of looking at the hedge-rows, of examining a piece of lichen on a tree, his eyes all the time furtively turning toward that rude little temple of his soul. What a place to be called by such a name! And yet the place was not so much to be found fault with. The hedge was irregular and broken, raised a little above the path, with a rough little bit of wall, all ferns and mosses, supporting the bank of earth from which it grew; above it, glistening in the low red rays of the afternoon sun, were the lattice windows of the upper story, with the eaves of an uneven roof--old tiles covered with every kind of growth--overshadowing them; a cottage as unlike as possible to those dreadful dwellings of the poor which are the result of sanitary science and economy combined; a little human habitation harmonized by age and use with all its surroundings, and which no one need be ashamed to call home. So Walter said to himself as he stood and looked at it in the light of romance and the afternoon sun. It was as venerable as Penton itself, and had many features in common with the great house. It was more respectable and more lovely than the damp gentility of Penton Hook, which was old-new, with plaster peeling off, and a shabby modernism in its vulgar walls. Crockford’s cottage pretended to nothing, it was all it meant to be. It was in its way a beautiful place, being so harmonized by nature, so well adapted to its uses. Walter’s estimate of it increased as the moments went on. He felt at last that to bring his bride from such an abode was next door to bringing her from an ideal palace of romance; perhaps better even than that, seeing that there would be all the pleasure of setting her in the sphere which she would adorn; for would not she adorn--it was an old-fashioned phrase, yet one that suited the occasion--any sphere?