d how harvests please
When nowhere grain worth growing
Greets autumn's questing breeze,
And garnerers garner these--
Vain words and wasted breath
And spilth and tasteless lees--
Until released by death.

"Unwillingly foreknowing
That love with May-time flees,
We take this day's bestowing,
And feed on fantasies
Such as love lends for ease
Where none but travaileth,
With lean, infrequent fees,
Until released by death."

And Florian shook his sleek, black head. "A very foolish and
pessimistical old song, a superfluous song, and a song that is
particularly out of place in the loveliest spot in the loveliest of all
possible worlds."

Yet Florian took no inventory of the gardens. There was but a happy
sense of green and gold, with blue topping all; of twinkling, fluent,
tossing leaves and of the gray under side of elongated, straining
leaves; a sense of pert bird-noises, and of a longer shadow than usual
slanting before him, and a sense of youth and well-being everywhere.
Certainly it was not a morning wherein pessimism might hope to flourish.

Instead, it was of Adelaide that Florian thought: of the tall,
impulsive, and yet timid, fair girl who was both shrewd and innocent,
and of her tenderly colored loveliness, and of his abysmally unmerited
felicity in having won her. Why, but what, he reflected, grimacing--what
if he had too hastily married somebody else? For he had earlier fancied
other women for one reason or another: but this, he knew, was the great
love of his life, and a love which would endure unchanged as long as his
life lasted.

III. WHAT COMES OF MARRYING HAPPILY

The tale tells how Florian de Puysange found Adelaide in the company of
two ladies who were unknown to him. One of these was very old, the other
an imposing matron in middle life. The three were pleasantly shaded by
young oak-trees; beyond was a tall hedge of clipped yew. The older women
were at chess, while Adelaide bent her meek, golden head to some of that
fine needle-work in which the girl delighted. And beside them rippled a
small sunlit stream, which babbled and gurgled with silver flashes.
Florian hastily noted these things as he ran laughing to his wife.

"Heart's dearest!" he cried. And he saw, perplexed, that Adelaide had
risen with a faint, wordless cry, and was gazing at him as though she
were puzzled and alarmed a very little.

"Such an adventure as I have to tell y