mer found "Eden" no less restful and luxuriant in its July setting
than it was in the freshness of June.

The afternoon train had crawled lazily up the Winnowoc Valley on
schedule time, permitting Eugene Wellington, in white flannels, white
oxfords, and pink-pin-striped white silk shirt, fresh from shave and
shower-bath, to come on schedule time to the rose-arbor for a conference
with Mrs. Darby.

The swift flow of events had not outwardly affected the handsome young
man. The time of the early June roses had found him poor in worldly
goods, but rich in a trained mind, a developed genius, a yearning after
all things beautiful, a faith in divine Providence, abounding confidence
in his own power to win to the mastery in his beloved art, and glorying
in his freedom to do the thing he chose to do. It found him in love, and
the almost accepted lover of a beautiful, wilful, magnetic girl--a girl
with a sturdy courage in things wherein he was lacking; a frivolous,
untrained girl, yet with surprising dependableness in any crisis. It
found him the favorite nephew of a quiet, uninteresting, rich old
money-grubbing uncle and his dominant, but highly approving wife, whose
elegant home was always open to him the while he felt himself a
pensioner on its hospitality.

Mid-July found him, in effect, the master where he had been the poor
relation; the rich uncle gone forever from earthly affairs; a dominant
aunt still ruling--so she fancied--as she had always ruled, but with the
consciousness of her first defeated purpose rankling bitterly within
her. It found Eugene still in love with the same beautiful, wilful girl,
but far from any assurance of being a really accepted lover. It found
him insensibly forgetting the aspirations of a lifetime and beginning,
little by little, to grasp after the Egyptian flesh-pots. Life was fast
becoming a round of easy days, whose routine duties were more than
compensated by its charming domestic settings. The one unsatisfied
desire was for the presence of the bright, inspiring girl who had left a
void when she went away, for whose return all "Eden" was waiting.

The swift course of events had created other changes. Some growths are
slow, and some amazingly swift, depending upon the nature of the
life-germ in the seed and the soil of the planting. In Eugene Wellington
the love of beauty found its comfort in his present planting. It was
easier to stay where beauty was ready-made than to go out and creat