is very
ear, with an insistence of meaning; the spring flowers bloomed where
he had never seen them, and the fragrance of each was as evident to
him as a voice.

Jerome wondered vaguely if this strange exaltation of spirit were
illness. Sunday morning, when he could not eat his breakfast, his
mother told him that there were red spots on his cheeks, and she
feared he was feverish.

He laughed scornfully at the idea, but looked curiously at himself in
his little square of mirror, when he was dressing for meeting. The
red spots were there, burning in his cheeks, and his eyes were
brilliant. For a minute he wondered anxiously if he were feverish, if
he were going to be ill, and, if so, what his mother and sister would
do. He even felt his own pulse as he stood there, and discovered that
it was quick. Then, all at once, his face in the glass looked out at
him with a flash as from some sub-state of consciousness in the
depths of his own being, which he could not as yet quite fathom.

"I don't know what ails me," he muttered, as he turned away. He felt
as he had when puzzling over the unknown quantity in an algebraic
equation. It was not until he was sitting in meeting, looking forward
at Lucina's fair profile, cut in clear curves like a lily, that the
solution came to him.

"I'm what they call in love," Jerome said to himself. He turned very
pale, and looked away from Lucina. He felt as if suddenly he had come
to the brink of some dread abyss of nature.

"That is why I want to go to see her to-night," he thought. "I won't
go; I won't!"

Just before the bell stopped tolling, Doctor Prescott's family went
up the aisle in stately file, the doctor marching ahead with an
imperious state which seemed to force contributions from followers
and beholders, as if a peacock were to levy new eyes for his plumage
from all admiration along his path. The doctor's wife, in her satins
and Indian cashmeres, followed him, moving with massive gentleness, a
long ostrich plume in her bonnet tossing softly. Last came Lawrence,
slight and elegantly erect, in his city broadcloth and linen, a
figure so like his father as to seem almost his double, and yet with
a difference beyond that of age, so palpable that a child might see
it--a self-spelled word, with a different meaning in two languages.

The Merritt pew was just behind Doctor Prescott's. Lawrence had not
been seated long before he turned slightly and cast a smiling glance
around at bea