nd fragrant hair; it shines in her very voice; it shines in
every word she utters, even in the unkindest."

"Dear me! what an alarmingly refulgent person you depict!" laughed Maria
Dolores, her eyes still on the wall.

"I have no gift for word-painting," said John; "though I doubt if the
words are yet invented that could fitly paint my lady. She grows in
beauty day by day. It's a literal fact--every fresh time I see her, she
is perceptibly more lovely than the last, more love-compelling in her
loveliness. But 'tis a thing unpaintable, indescribable, as
indescribable as the perfume of a rose. Oh, why haven't I five thousand
a year?"

"You harp so persistently upon your desire for money," suggested Maria
Dolores, "one might infer she was a commodity, to be bought and sold.
You begin at the wrong end. What good would five or fifty thousand a
year do you, if you had not begun by winning her love?

"No, I begin at the proper end, worse luck," John answered, glooming.
"For, without a decent income, I have no right even to try to win her
love.

"And that being so," questioned Maria Dolores, "I hope you
conscientiously avoid her society, or, when you meet, make yourself
consistently disagreeable to her?

"There's no need for such precautions," John replied. "There's no fear
for her. She regards me as a casual and passing acquaintance. So I make
myself no more disagreeable than I am by nature. And if I avoided her
society, (which I am far from doing), it would be not for her sake, but
for my own. For, though her society is to me a kind of anticipation of
the joys of Heaven, yet when I leave it and find myself alone, the
reaction is dreary in the superlative degree; and the fear, which
perpetually haunts me (for I know nothing of her plans), lest I shall
never see her again, is agonizing as a foretaste of--Heaven's antipode.
Oh, I love her!"

He took, involuntarily I dare say, a step in her direction. She
retreated under the vaulting of the _porte-cochere_.

"You seem," she commented, "to be getting a good deal of emotional
experience,--which doubtless some day you will find of value. Why not,
instead of gardener, embark as novelist or poet? Here is material you
could then turn to account."

"Ah, there you are," he complained, piteously, "mocking me again. Ah,
well, if you must have your laugh, have it, and welcome. A man can learn
to take the bitter with the sweet."

"To spare you that discomfort," said she, moving