The St. Johns herald., 1896-12-19
TOO YOUNG TO MARRY

JOluule MdQlSOu QWelI Ill NOru1du 8 inn when he first came to London He was the only son of his mother, and she was a canon's widow. It was at her desire that he set up his household goods under the time-worn gables of Norman's inn; for there also dwelt a kinsman of the late canon's, Arkwright by name, who was always alluded to in the family as "a steady, plodding young man," and was supposed to live amid a picturesque litter of briefs and books; and the canon's widow hoped he might exercise a mildly restraining influence over Johnnie, being nearly twice his age.
 Now the steady, plodding young man looked forward to his arrival without enthusiasm He remembered Johnnie as very inky schoolboy of phenomenal lung power and unpreposSessing ap- pearance, and felt assured that by now he should have developed into a rakish young man with a taste for small dogs and large neckties, and greatly given to entertaining noisy company; we'll knowing that the chastened atmos- phere of a cathedral town does not nee essarily induce an affection for quiet living in the youthful breast.
 Johnnie, however, proved to be a fresh-colored, amiable youth of p, more plentifully endowed with muscle than with brain power, and with no ap- parent tendency to come immediately to grief amid what Arkwright would have called-he sometimes wrote for the papers-the shoals and Quicksands of London life. He neither gambled nor drank, nor gave his mind too en- tirely to the lightly clad allurements of light opera. On the contrary. he read with industry as though already covet- ous of the woolsack, he danced and dined assiduously at houses of ire proacLable responsibility; and, in Ark wright's company, when he did not talk cricket he talked shop.
 Then by degrees, when returned from nocturnal adventures, he began to favor Arkwright with many condolences re- garding his attitude toward various members of the other sex; for Johnnie's affairs of the heart became at last alarmingly numerous. Not that he aimed at playing the part of Don Juan; but, being of highly inflammable material, his heart was SucceSsively ignited by a pleasing variety of dam- Sels.
 Fate brought him face to face with the one and inevitable damsel at last, however. Audrey St. Clair was a dark eyed girl of 20; Johnnie thought her charmingly fresh and natural. Mrs. Leyerson's ball was a rapturous occa- sion to him, and Mrs. Leverson'S niece Audrey entirely dispossessed all other idols, from that date, of the pedestal upon which Johnnie had successively placed them.
 Of Mrs. Leverson herself her enemies said that she had been pretty; elderly gentlemen had been known to call her 3 fine woman, while young ones thought her mot halfbad fun" She possessed an abundance of obviously dyed hair, a somewhat effusive manner and faultless taste in dress. The late la mented Captain Leverson had indulged taste for speculation, with disastrous results, and hence the few people who remembered her were surprised to find the widow when she returned from a long absence abroad so comfortably in- stalled as she was in her house at Chel- sea.
 Johnnie she seemed to hold in high favor. He was allowed to take her and her niece through the polite mobs of the picture galleries; he never failed to appear at her tat homes," and he ire quently made one at her theater par ties. But, although he thought Mrs. Leverson "aw'fy kind, and all that sort of thing" she would have preferred to see her niece subject to less worldly in- fiuences than those brought to bear upon her.
 In accordance with the fitness of things, he vaguely imagined she should always be dressed in white, wander ing through sheltered rose gardens and indulglng an amiable solicitude for birds and dogs and poor old cottagers- a village Lady Bountiful, in short. And to tell the truth the unconscious maiden