portraits, she turned and walked rapidly
out of the parlor. She had enough troubles of her own without bearing
the troubles of all these faces. Later on she could confront them with
equanimity--that company of the pallid, the desperately sick, the
unaccountably uncomfortable. All looked, not as though there had been a
death in the family, but a death in the collection: only the same grief
could have so united them as mourners. And whatever else they lacked,
each showed two hands, the full number, placed where they were sure to
be counted.

She was in the midst of this psychological reversion to ancestral
gayety when David arrived. Each looked quickly at the other with
unconscious fear. Within a night and a day each had drawn nearer to the
other; and each secretly inquired whether the other now discovered this
nearness. Gabriella saw at least that he, too, was excited with
happiness.

He appeared to her for the first time handsome. He WAS better looking.
When one approaches the confines of love, one nears the borders of
beauty. Nature sets going a certain work of decoration, of
transformation. Had David about this time been a grouse, he would
probably have displayed a prodigious ruff. Had he been a bulbul and
continued to feel as he did, he would have poured into the ear of night
such roundelays as had never been conceived of by that disciplined
singer. Had he been a master violinist, he would have been unable to
play a note from a wild desire to flourish the bow. He had long stood
rooted passively in the soil of being like a century plant when it is
merely keeping itself in existence. But latterly, feeling in advance
the approach of the Great Blossoming Hour, he had begun to shoot up
rapidly into a lofty life-stalk; there were inches of the rankest
growth on him within the last twenty-four hours. To-night he was not
even serious in his conversation; and therefore he was the more
awkward. His emotions were unmanageable; much more his talk. But she
who witnesses this awkwardness and understands--does she ever fail to
pardon?

"Last night," he said with a droll twinkle, after the evening was about
half spent, "there was one subject I did not speak to you about--Man's
place in Nature. Have you ever thought about that?"

"I've been too busy thinking about my place in the school!" said
Gabriella, laughing--Gabriella who at all times was simplicity and
clearness.

"You see Nature does nothing for Man except what she en