ver the closer garlanding,
and the whole lay upon a bed of exquisitely curled and laminated
soft gray lichen.

A message. Yes, it was a simple thing, an unostentatious
remembrance; no breaking, surely, of his father's conditions. Rodney
loyally kept away and manfully stuck to his business, but every
spire and frond and leaf of green in this winter wreath shed off the
secret, magnetic meaning with which it was charged. Heart-light
flowed from them, and touching the responsive sensitivity, made
photographs that pictured the whole story. It was a fuller telling
of what the star-leaved ferns had told before.

Rodney was not to "offer himself" to Sylvie Argenter till the two
years were over; he was to let her have her life and its chances; he
was to prove himself, and show that he could earn and keep a little
money; he was to lay by two thousand dollars. This was what he had
undertaken to do. His father thought he had a right to demand these
two years, even extending beyond the term of legal freedom, to
offset the half-dozen of boyish, heedless extravagance, before he
should put money into his son's hands to begin responsible work
with, or consent approvingly to his making of what might be only a
youthful attraction, a tie to bind him solemnly and unalterably for
life.

But the very stones cry out. The meaning that is repressed from
speech intensifies in all that is permitted. You may keep two
persons from being nominally "engaged," but you cannot keep two
hearts, by any mere silence, from finding each other out; and the
inward betrothal in which they trust and wait,--that is the most
beautiful time of all. The blessedness of acknowledgment, when it
comes, is the blessedness of owning and looking back together upon
what has already been.

Sylvie made a space for the white box upon a broad old bureau-top in
her room. She put its cover on again over the message in green
cipher; she would only care to look at it on purpose, and once in a
while; she would not keep it out to the fading light and soiling
touch of every day. She spread across the cover itself and its
written sentence her last remaining broidered and laced
handkerchief. The wreath would dry, she knew; it must lose its first
glossy freshness with which it had come from under the snows; but it
should dry there where Rodney put it, and not a leaf should fall out
of it and be lost.

She was happier in these subtle signs that revealed inward relation
than she wo