You will not be interested in anything but the result, which was somewhat out of the usual course, and may therefore shock you. But you must remember that I am telling you of matters which young men usually keep to themselves, and that whatever I did, was accomplished in a spirit of respect only a shade less constraining in its power than the love that was at once my impelling force, and my constant embarrassment.
To come, then, to the point, a piano was to be set up in that house on that very day, Mr. Preston having yielded to the solicitations of his daughter for a new instrument. My friend was to be engaged in the transfer, and at my solicitation for leave to assist in the operation, gave his consent in perfect confidence as to my possessing good and sufficient reasons for such a remarkable request, and appointed the hour at which I was to meet him at the ware-rooms.
Behold me, then, at half-past two that afternoon, assisting with my own hands in carrying a piano up the stoop of that house which, four hours before, I had regarded as unapproachable. Dressed in a workman’s blouse and with my hair well roughened under a rude cap that effectually disguised me, I advanced with but little fear of detection. And yet no sooner had I entered the house and seen at a glance that the aspect of the hall coincided with my rather vague remembrance of that through which I had been ushered a week before, than I was struck by a sudden sense of my situation, and experiencing that uncomfortable consciousness of self-betrayal, which a blush always gives a man, stumbled forward under my heavy burden, feeling as if a thousand eyes were fixed upon me and my cherished secret, instead of the two sharp but totally unsuspicious orbs of the elderly matron that surveyed us from the top of the banisters. “Be careful there, you’ll knock a hole through that glass door!” though a