tied. He wrote but a single line:

"So it should have been 'good-by' after all."

Laura had Annie put the roses in Page's room.

"Tell Page she can have them; I don't want them. She can wear them to
her dance to-night," she said.

While to herself she added:

"The little buds in the park will be prettier."

She was gone from the house over two hours, for she had elected to walk
all the way home. She came back flushed and buoyant from her exercise,
her cheeks cool with the Lake breeze, a young maple leaf in one of the
revers of her coat. Annie let her in, murmuring:

"A gentleman called just after you went out. I told him you were not at
home, but he said he would wait. He is in the library now."

"Who is he? Did he give his name?" demanded Laura.

The maid handed her Curtis Jadwin's card.

V

That year the spring burst over Chicago in a prolonged scintillation of
pallid green. For weeks continually the sun shone. The Lake, after
persistently cherishing the greys and bitter greens of the winter
months, and the rugged white-caps of the northeast gales, mellowed at
length, turned to a softened azure blue, and lapsed by degrees to an
unruffled calmness, incrusted with innumerable coruscations.

In the parks, first of all, the buds and earliest shoots asserted
themselves. The horse-chestnut bourgeons burst their sheaths to spread
into trefoils and flame-shaped leaves. The elms, maples, and
cottonwoods followed. The sooty, blackened snow upon the grass plats,
in the residence quarters, had long since subsided, softening the turf,
filling the gutters with rivulets. On all sides one saw men at work
laying down the new sod in rectangular patches.

There was a delicious smell of ripening in the air, a smell of sap once
more on the move, of humid earths disintegrating from the winter
rigidity, of twigs and slender branches stretching themselves under the
returning warmth, elastic once more, straining in their bark.

On the North Side, in Washington Square, along the Lake-shore Drive,
all up and down the Lincoln Park Boulevard, and all through Erie,
Huron, and Superior streets, through North State Street, North Clarke
Street, and La Salle Avenue, the minute sparkling of green flashed from
tree top to tree top, like the first kindling of dry twigs. One could
almost fancy that the click of igniting branch tips was audible as
whole beds of yellow-green sparks defined themselves within certain
elms and cottonwo