unknowingly made a standard of comparison for all other women. Bessie was so curiously unlike her that there was a charm in this new study.

To do him justice, he pursued it faithfully. He pretended to be there for troutfishing; but the trout had little to fear. There was always a reason for his going to see Bessie Crandall, which would not admit of delay. He sent to town for books and music-and one by one he must take them to her. He had a tenor voice, full of flexibility and sweetness, and he sang to her while she played his accompaniments. If he went fishing, she must go to show him the way.

None of these proceedings disturbed Dr. Crandall. The manner in which their acquaintance began had made the Doctor friendly. He was glad to make the return of a cheerful and cordial hospitality. As for Bessie, it never occurred to him that she was in any danger. If it had been suggested, he would have said that he knew Bessie, and she wasn't the girl to fancy every acquaintance a lover, or to lose her heart until somebody asked for it.

In this last, he would have been right; but there are more ways of asking than one. Walter Phelps spoke no word of love, but the songs he sang were tender with some passionate old poet's devotion and longing-the books he gave her were such as a lover would choose-and his daily eagerness to see her, told her more plainly than words how pleasant he found her society. She combined in her nature the fervor of a woman and the honest simplicity of a child. She was too inexperienced to ask herself why he did not speak—it was sufficient for her that he was. Her heart had been like a tight-closed rosebud when he came; and its petals were opening already to the warmth of this new summer, of which he was the sun.

Meantime, he, poor fellow, was not quite comfortable in his mind. This acquaintance had not been less pleasant than he imagined it would be-but it was growing too serious. Not that Bessie had in the slightest degree thrown herself at his head. She was too delicate a woman-too shy beneath her frankness-for anything like that. To save his life he could not tell whether she really cared for him or not, and he was beginning to long ardently to know. Yet it was a question that he must not ask; and he began to see that from asking it he could find no decent, not to say chivalrous, escape. If he had been

wooing Bessie Crandall for his wife, he could hardly have done more or other than he had been doing for nearly six weeks past. And now his family were imperatively summoning him. They had returned as far as Saratoga; and, in this haunt of the well-dressed, they found one escort for them all an insufficient allowance-he must have caught and eaten trout enough by this time to turn his brain into phosphorus, and, really, they could spare him no longer. He felt that he must go-at once, that is, to-morrow. This afternoon he would pass with Bessie.

As he went toward the house where he had spent so many pleasant hours he felt himself a coward. Could he go away and not tell her the truth? Would any truth, however hard or cruel, be so ignoble as to depart, leaving her, if indeed she cared for him at all, a prey to the vain expectations he had done his best to create? Wouldbut he paused. Fate must settle it all. Perhaps she did not care; and if so no harm was done. But all the while he was conscious of a wild, miserable longing to see the light of love in her eyes, and to kiss the sweet, sensitive mouth, trembling with its first words of tenderness for him. He went in, and found Bessie in the great, cool parlor, fragrant with flowers. She was a creature of infinite variety; coquettish sometimes, argumentative sometimes, serious sometimes, and never twice the same. This afternoon she was changeful and brilliant, and elusive as the hummingbird that flitted in and out of the rose-tree under her window. Her mood tortured him. If he was brutal, that torture, perhaps, was a slight excuse-but then brutality is so often the resource of a perplexed man. If he only knew whether she cared for him! If not, he might spare himself the confession he had to make-but how could he be sure?

He drew a picture from his pocket, a little miniature painted on ivory-the face of a woman pure and proud and cold"icily regular, splendidly null," he had said to himself this very day as he looked at it in his own chamber.

"I believe I have never shown you this," he said, handing it to Bessie,-" do you think it handsome?"

"Your sister?" she asked, looking at the picture carelessly.

"No, my cousin, Miss Margaret Sturgis, whom I am engaged to marry."

He had longed to know whether she

cared for him; but in that moment I think he would rather his doubt had remained unsolved.

She turned suddenly white to the very lips. As long as he lives he will never forget that momentary glimpse of her, with all her young warmth and brightness gone -a woman of stone. She was both proud and brave, and she would never lower her flag to the enemy. In a moment the color had come back to cheeks and lips, and her voice did not even tremble as she answered, quietly

"Yes, she is very handsome; one of those beauties about whom there can be no question. I congratulate you."

He had been shocked when he saw that she suffered; but now her swift composure piqued him, and he showed it in his tone as he replied:

"I am not sure that I am ready to be congratulated. Marriage, at best, is an experiment."

"I think you are disloyal to your cousin," she said, with a little scorn in her tone, "when you receive my congratulations in such doubtful fashion."

"Would to heaven that were my only disloyalty!" he murmured, in so low a voice that Bessie did not feel herself obliged to hear it. She led the conversation in quite other channels; and jested and mocked and sparkled, so that if he had not seen her white face of stone for that one revealing moment, he would have believed that she cared not at all for all the summer that was passed.

Dr. Crandall had returned before he went away, and the parting was general.

The next day he went to his cousin. A profound student of human nature says that, in marriage, the certainty "She will never love me much," is easier to bear than the fear "I shall love her no more." It must be much the same with lovers. There had always been a vague though possibly mistaken impression in Walter Phelps's mind that his cousin would never be very passionately in love with him; and that had never much troubled him. Passionate love, he thought, was not in the line of her temperament; and he had been well enough satisfied without it. Her grace and beauty had charmed his taste, her preference had flattered his pride; he had looked forward with pleasure to being the envied husband of a much admired woman, whose very coldness was his security, since she was sure never to turn

coquettish or light-minded on his hands.

But now a terrible fear beset him lest he should never be able to love her. He had not guessed how deep an impression Bessie had made on him until he felt how savorless the calm faultless beauty of Margaret Sturgis had become. Involuntarily he was constantly contrasting her with Bessie; as at Riverside he had been trying Bessie by her standard. It was like passing from a gallery of paintings, alive with color and glow and brightness, into a hall of sculptured marbles, still and pure and white, and oh! so cold. There are those who like the marbles best-who see in them a noble grace the more sensuous art of painting can never reach-but Walter Phelps was not of these. He missed Bessie's riant little face with its dark beauty, her gay laughter, her sudden. moods of half-pathetic tenderness; she was a woman, you perceive, after his own heart, while the homage he had paid to the other for so many years had been but the clear perception of his intellect.

66

He had never been used to self-control; no experience had taught him to submit patiently to discomforts of mind or body. He was uncomfortable now; and his boyish impulse was to run away from his uneasiness. He had not yet learned that trouble is like the ghost which had tormented a certain worthy family for years. The good wife finally concluded to move, in order to escape him; but when the last load of goods was on the van, a neighbor passed that way, and said, "So you're moving?" "Yes," cried the ghost, lifting from among the beds and cushions a voice of congratulation; "yes, we're all going. Walter Phelps had not learned that all maladies which are of the spirit have wings by right of birth, and will fly with us wherever we go. He thought Europe would have resources enough to put out of mind one little, brown, mocking face. He would try it. Miss Sturgis should go with him, if she would. He could take her over to the old Greek marble women, with whom she seemed to belong. What if she should choose to turn into stone there, and live on forever in a white dream of beauty? He laughed at his own conceit, and then went to his cousin.

With an altogether unflattering abruptness, he proposed to her to be married at once, and catch the next steamer for Europe. The mood to go was on him now he had no patience with waiting-as

for gowns and things, they were plenty there as blackberries in New Hampshire.

Miss Sturgis was a thorough-bred, selfcontained woman of the world; but she was neither without heart nor without perception. Whether the New Hampshire in his comparison suggested anything to her I do not know; but, at any rate, she had no mind to be married in an unsentimental haste that did not even pretend to excuse itself by any passionate ardor of love.

She refused his proposal with quiet firmness; and I do not think he was at all sorry to start upon his travels alone.

Europe diverted him, however, less than he had expected. He spoke American French, and it did not open to him any wild delights of a social nature. For vulgar dissipation he had no taste. At that stage in his career he was, no doubt, selfish. ease-loving, good-for-naught-but he was always pure-minded. The balls of the Mabille only disgusted him—the salons of a society, corresponding to his own in New York, were not open to him. He liked painting and music and sculpture, all of them with mild, good taste-not one of them was capable of giving him an intense emotion. He would have gone home in a year, had not the problem of his life waited at home for his solution. He sought for light on it in all the accustomed directions -he wintered in France to no purposehe passed the next winter in Rome, with no better success. A summer in Switzerland, and another in northern Europe served him no farther-and at the end of two years he went home, just as puzzled and uncomfortable a man as when he sailed away from New York.

Meantime Miss Sturgis had been thinking. Would a lover who loved her have staid away two years? When he had asked her to go with him, had it not been with a make-the-best-of-it air?

These thoughts were in her mind when he returned to her, and asked her if, at last, she were ready to name the wedding-day.

She looked at him with a curious expression of inquiry, just touched, or at least he thought so, with scorn.

"This is sweetly courteous of you, I am sure," she said, in her cold, clear tones; "but I want to understand you perfectlydo you ask me to be your wife because you love me with a love that would choose me out of all the world; or because, after our understanding in the past, honor constrains you?"

"It is late in the day to ask that question," he said, with what indignant manhood he could summon, now that you have been my promised wife four years." She smiled-a smile which promised. him no consolation.

"Well, I will change the conditions, then. I am no longer your promised wife. I withdraw every pledge I ever made you. Now, if you seek me, it must be afresh. You have thought me a cold woman; but I tell you that any man would marry me at his peril who could not give me the uttermost love of his heart. It would be a treason I could never forgive-I should be inexorable as death. Do not speak one word more to me of marriage, unless you know, in your soul, that you love me with a devotion that is absolute, exclusive, and for all time."

He had never come so near doing just this thing as at that moment. The keen excitement of her mood had breathed life into this seeming statue. Her eyes shone with a new fire. A brilliant scarlet glowed on her cheeks. There were new tones in her well-bred voice. He had never found her so intoxicating. I think he would have thrown himself at her feet, but that he feared her. Possibly, also, he feared himself. It may be that he had selfknowledge enough to understand that when the excitement of this mood was over, and she had gone back to her old graceful and gracious repose, she would fail to satisfy him, as she did before. With Bessie forever blithe and bonny and beguiling in his memory, dare he swear that he loved Margaret absolutely, exclusively, and for all time?

He rose and bowed courteously.

"You have chosen,” he said, “for what reason I am unable even to conjecture, to break the bonds that bound us-to cast doubts upon a feeling you seemed in other days to find satisfactory. Against such caprice I am not skilled or patient enough to contend. I will not torment you with entreaties-you shall be, as you have chosen, mistress of your own future."

He made his exit with dignity, as he thought. Her eyes followed him with a smile half scornful and wholly sad. “So go four years of a lifetime," she said to herself.

The very next afternoon found Mr. Phelps in Riverside. The image of Bessi · had taken on new charms, now that to win her seemed possible. One woman had

weighed him in the balance and found him wanting. There would be sweet and full amends in the greeting of this less judicial charmer, who had never seemed disposed even to criticise him. He found a cruel consolation in remembering the swift pallor that had overspread her face when he showed her Miss Sturgis's picture. All through his hurried journey he had been picturing to himself the sweetness of her welcome. How the young cheeks would crimson, the dewy eyes gleam and glow, the sweet mouth tremble! That there would be any difficulty-that she might be estranged, or cold, or dead even, never once occurred to him. Two years had gone by, bringing change and experience to him, as was natural, but she surely she must be still just that same half-opened rosebud of a girl-like a flower in a picture

that

"biddeth fair to blossom soon. But it never, never blossoms in this picture, and the moon

Never ceases to be crescent, and the June is always June!"

He went to see her at about the same hour on which he had seen her first. He knew the household ways. They would be through tea-the Doctor would have gone out-she would be alone. He would have the long twilight, the sweet summer evening, in which to make her happy, to sun himself in her soft joy. He half thought he should find her in the door, as he had seen her stand so often, white-robed and fair. But he saw no one when he drew near the house. For the first time he thought, "what, if she were dead!" and shivered, as he knocked at the door. A new servant answered his summons, and his inquiry whether Miss Bessie was in.

He sent up his card, and then waited for her in the parlor below, his heart beating as no woman had ever made it beat before. She looked at the bit of paste-board, and smiled. He had come again, then-this man who held her heart in the hollow of his hand, that other summer, and played with and pitied it, "with a poor-thing negligence!" She took a sheet of paper, and wrote on it:

"Do not come to-night-I will tell you why, to-morrow."

This she gave to her maid, with a few words of direction; and then looking a moment in the glass-for who does not adjust his armor before going into battleshe went down stairs.

She was not quite the Bessie Walter Phelps had expected to see; yet he could not have defined the change. Certainly she was not less beautiful. If anything, her sparkling, changeful face had gained in charm. But there was an added selfpossession in her manner-a new pride in voice and gesture. This was not a girl for any man to love and ride away. Nor, sincere as was his purpose, did he find it easy to tell her for what he had come. She had some new power over herself and others. She chose, for a while, to keep the conversation on indifferent subjects. She wished to take a fresh sense of this hero, whose star had once ruled her heavens-to see, with her matured powers of perception, what manner of man he was. Would he

be able to stir her pulses with any of the old thrill? She thought not-but he might try, if he chose; it would be well that she should be altogether sure of herself.

He

So at last she let him ask the question for the sake of which he had come. was too much in earnest, now, for dainty gallantries. He asked her in a few plain words to be his wife; and she answered with a little spice of wickedness, for she was a very human little creature:

"But your cousin, Miss Margaret Sturgis! I supposed you had married her, long ago." "No, Bessie, you had made that impossible. I only found out how well I loved you after I had left you. Margaret was too clear-sighted to be deceived, and when she guessed my secret she gave me up. Never fear but I am honorably released. I am yours, now, if you will have me."

"I am afraid Mr. Robert Niles would object," she said, demurely.

"Who is Mr. Robert Niles?"

She answered with deliberate cruelty, bearing in mind the very words with which, two years before, he had turned her to

stone:

"My friend, whom I am engaged to marry."

Walter Phelps was proud. There is pluck and courage in the jeunesse dorée. He, too, remembered the old time-the old words. "I congratulate you," he said, as coolly as she had spoken the same words of old.

"Thank you," she answered-"I know Mr. Niles so well that I do not think my marriage will be an experiment."

Just before he left her, his heart softened over her, and conquered his pride. "I have loved you very dearly," he said.

"I did not guess how well, in that old summer; but I knew afterwards that I had never really cared for any other woman. Is it too much for me to ask, in the name of all I feel for you, whether you love this Mr. Niles?"

Her nature, always as exquisitely true as it was exquisitely tender, impelled her to the frank confidence which was all she could give him now. If he were really noble enough to rejoice in her happiness, she would make him sure of it.

"Yes," she said, with grave, sweet seriousness. "I love Robert Niles. I was very near to loving you, two summers ago; but I felt that you treated me ill. You had played with my heart for pastime, but it was a prouder heart than you knew. You had amused yourself with me, careless of what you might make me suffer, while you, yourself, were engaged to another woman. When I knew the truth, it aroused against you my pride and my indignation, and they cured my budding love. Since then I have known and loved Robert Niles, and he satisfies me entirely." Walter Phelps looked at her in the soft summer dusk-this fair woman who was not for him. He knew that he had sold his birthright for a mess of pottage; and that for him there was no place for repentance.

"God bless you for a sweet, true woman, whosever wife you are," he said fervently; and then he went away from her in the twilight, out of the peaceful old house; out of the lilac-bordered yard; out of her life, forever.

Rumor says that sometime after that he tried to win back Margaret Sturgis and failed. She married his younger brother John, who had adored her with singlehearted devotion since that summer when he did escort duty at the Northern Lakes in place of Walter, the absentee. John has never been known to complain that his wife was cold. He prefers his stately white

lily to any other man's ardent rose; and there are those who testify to having seen Mrs. John Phelps in her nursery, and heard her, talk sweet, foolish, idle baby-talk as rapturously as any common mother of them all.

So you perceive our trifler wasted no one's day but his own, in his pastime. The two women, neither of whom he quite knew how to love steadfastly, were happy in spite of him; and he-we can afford to pity him, for he is very much alone.

Nor does he enjoy loneliness. Certain platitudes about love are much in fashion, implying that man's need of love is less than woman's; but there are men and men, as there are women and women. Walter Phelps is precisely the kind of man to covet domestic life. Dissipation, as I said, does not attract him, for his nature is refined. He has money enough without looking for it, so he has not the excitement of business. He has no political ambition; nor has he the tastes of a student. A happy home is precisely what he needs; but he threw his chance for that away in his youth. Remembering the past, he has a vague idea what love is; and he is determined not to marry without it. So, ever since, he has been pursuing a hope that has constantly eluded him. He can never, try how he will, feel again the glow at his heart that warmed him when he waited that last day for Bessie, in the old house at Riverside. Society has come, at last, to look with mild contempt upon his patient experiments.

I danced with him, last night-a wellpreserved man of forty-five-and I wondered if he, as well as I, heard an all-wise young chit of seventeen, in the insolent pride of youth and beauty, say to the pretty boy of twenty who was holding her

fan

"Just see what airs he gives himself, that old beau !"