he returned
lightly. "On the other hand, I should say that he who is content with
less gets nothing. I ask the biggest thing Fate has to give, and then
stand waiting for--"

He paused for a breathless instant while he looked at her, and then
slowly finished:

"For the skies to fall."

They swung open the gate into cattle lane, and stood waiting while the
cows trooped by to the barnyard.

Eugenia called them by name, and they turned great stupid eyes upon her
as they stopped to munch the hollyhocks.

"She was named after you," said the girl suddenly.

"She? Who?" he turned a helpless look upon the two small negroes who
drove the cows.

"Why, Burr Bess, of course--that Jersey there. You know we couldn't name
her Nick because she wasn't a boy, so Bernard called her Burr Bess. You
don't seem pleased."

"She's a fine cow," observed Nicholas critically.

"Oh! she was the most beautiful calf! I thought you remembered it. One
was named after me, but it died, and one was named after Bernard, but it
went to the butcher. Bernard was so angry about it that he waylaid the
cart on the road and let it out. But they caught it again. It was too
bad, wasn't it?"

The garden gate closed behind them with a click, and they crossed the
lane to the lawn.

Miss Chris, who stood shading her eyes in the back porch, was giving
directions to Aunt Verbeny in the smoke-house. When she saw Nicholas
she broke off and asked him to stay to supper, but he declined hastily,
and, with an embarrassed good-evening, turned back into the lane. The
hollyhocks over the whitewashed fence brushed him as he passed, and the
spices of the garden came to him like the essence of the eternal
Romance.

III

Over all hung Indian summer and the happy sunshine. Eugenia, rising at
daybreak for a gallop across country, would feel the dew in her face and
the autumn in her blood. As she dashed over fences and ditches to the
unploughed pasture, the morning was as desolate as midnight--not a soul
showed in the surrounding fields and the long road lay as pallid as a
streak of frost. The loneliness and the hour set her eyes to dancing and
the glad blood to bounding in her veins. When a startled rabbit shied
from the brushwood she would slacken her speed to watch it, and when, as
sometimes chanced, she frightened a covey of partridges from their
retreat, she went softly, rejoicing that no shot was near.

At this time she was possessed, perhaps, of a spiri