So he will always smile. There shall never be any cross words or angry
frowns to chill their perfect love! Their lives will be a summer
dream, a golden legend, a pure, fond idyl.

Thus beguiling time with beliefs too sweet for earthly power to grant,
she hastens home, with each step building up another story in her airy
house, until at length she carries a castle, tall and stately, into
her father's house.

CHAPTER X.

"I have no other but a woman's reason:
I think him so, because I think him so."--SHAKESPEARE.

"Where is papa?" she asks, meeting one of the servants in the hall.
Hearing he is out, and will not be back for some time, she, too, turns
again to the open door, and, as though the house is too small to
contain all the thoughts that throng her breast, she walks out into
the air again, and passes into the garden, where autumn, though kindly
and slow in its advances, is touching everything with the hand of
death.

"Heavily hangs the broad sunflower
Over its grave i' the earth so chilly;
Heavily hangs the hollyhock,
Heavily hangs the tiger lily."

With a sigh she quits her beloved garden, and wanders still! farther
abroad into the deep woods that "have put their glory on," and are
dressed in tender russets, and sad greens, and fading tints, that meet
and melt into each other.

The dry leaves are falling, and lie crackling under foot. The daylight
is fading, softly, imperceptibly, but surely. There is yet a glow from
the departing sunlight, that, sinking lazily beyond the distant hills,
tinges with gold the browning earth that in her shroud of leaves is
lying.

But death, or pain, or sorrow, has no part with Clarissa to-day. She
is quite happy,--utterly content. She marks not the dying of the year,
but rather the beauty of the sunset. She heeds not the sullen roar of
the ever-increasing streamlets, that winter will swell into small but
angry rivers; hearing only the songs of the sleepy birds as they croon
their night-songs in the boughs above her.

When an hour has passed, and twilight has come up and darkened all the
land, she goes back again to her home, and, reaching the library,
looks in, to find her father sitting there, engrossed as usual with
some book, which he is carefully annotating as he reads.

"Are you very busy?" asks she, coming slowly up to him. "I want to be
with you for a little while."

"That is right. I am never too busy to talk to you. Why, it is quit