gold.'

"or

'Shall I sonnet-sing you about myself?
Do I live in a house you would like to see?'

"or

'I am a Painter who cannot paint,
----No end to all I cannot do.
_Yet do one thing at least I can,
Love a man, or hate a man!_'

"or just

'Escape me?
Never,
Beloved!
While I am I, and you are you!'

"Oh, Honey! Won't it be fun? Just you and I, perhaps, in all
this Big City, sitting up and thinking about each other.
Can you smell the white birch smoke in this letter?"

[Illustration: "Well I'll be hanged," growled Stanton, "if I'm going
to be strung by any boy!"]

Almost unconsciously Stanton raised the page to his face.
Unmistakably, up from the paper rose the strong, vivid scent--of a
briar-wood pipe.

"Well I'll be hanged," growled Stanton, "if I'm going to be strung by
any boy!" Out of all proportion the incident irritated him.

But when, the next evening, a perfectly tremendous bunch of yellow
jonquils arrived with a penciled line suggesting, "If you'll put these
solid gold posies in your window to-morrow morning at eight o'clock,
so I'll surely know just which window is yours, I'll look up--when I
go past," Stanton most peremptorily ordered the janitor to display the
bouquet as ornately as possible along the narrow window-sill of the
biggest window that faced the street. Then all through the night he
lay dozing and waking intermittently, with a lovely, scared feeling in
the pit of his stomach that something really rather exciting was about
to happen. By surely half-past seven he rose laboriously from his bed,
huddled himself into his black-sheep wrapper and settled himself down
as warmly as could be expected, close to the draughty edge of the
window.

V

"Little and lame and red-haired and brown-eyed," he kept repeating to
himself.

Old people and young people, cab-drivers and jaunty young girls, and
fat blue policeman, looked up, one and all with quick-brightening
faces at the really gorgeous Spring-like flame of jonquils, but in a
whole chilly, wearisome hour the only red-haired person that passed
was an Irish setter puppy, and the only lame person was a
wooden-legged beggar.

Cold and disgusted as he was, Stanton could not altogether help
laughing at his own discomfiture.

"Why--hang that little girl! She ought to be s-p-a-n-k-e-d," he
chuckled as he climbed back into his tiresome bed.

Then as though t