around, and right before the
summer-house the wind has with great diligence whirled the loveliest of
them together, into a neat little round cairn.

The trees are already leafless, and on a naked branch sits the little
garden-warbler with its rust-brown breast--like a withered leaf left
hanging--and repeats untiringly a little fragment which it remembers of
its spring-song.

The only thriving thing in the whole picture is the ivy; for ivy, like
sorrow, is fresh both summer and winter.

It comes creeping along with its soft feelers, it thrusts itself into
the tiniest chinks, it forces its way through the minutest crannies;
and not until it has waxed wide and strong do we realize that it can no
longer be rooted up, but will inexorably strangle whatever it has laid
its clutches on.

Ivy, however, is like well-bred sorrow; it cloaks its devastations
with fair and glossy leaves. Thus people wear a glossy mask of smiles,
feigning to be unaware of the ivy-clad ruins among which their lot is
cast.--

In the middle of the open summer-house sits a young girl on a rush
chair; both hands rest in her lap. She is sitting with bent head and a
strange expression in her beautiful face. It is not vexation or anger,
still less is it commonplace sulkiness, that utters itself in her
features; it is rather bitter and crushing disappointment. She looks as
if she were on the point of letting something slip away from her which
she has not the strength to hold fast--as if something were withering
between her hands.

The man who is leaning with one hand upon her chair is beginning to
understand that the situation is graver than he thought. He has done
all he can to get the quarrel, so trivial in its origin, adjusted
and forgotten; he has talked reason, he has tried playfulness; he
has besought forgiveness, and humbled himself--perhaps more than he
intended--but all in vain. Nothing avails to arouse her out of the
listless mood into which she has sunk.

Thus it is with an expression of anxiety that he bends down towards her:
"But you know that at heart we love each other so much."

"Then why do we quarrel so easily, and why do we speak so bitterly and
unkindly to each other?"

"Why, my dear! the whole thing was the merest trifle from the first."

"That's just it! Do you remember what we said to each other? How we
vied with each other in trying to find the word we knew would be most
wounding? Oh, to think that we used our knowledge of