ecrets!" exclaimed Malcom; "so we must turn aside!"

"Do go to drive with me," begged Howard. "Here we are close to my hotel,
and I can have the team ready right off."

So they walked a few steps along the Lung' Arno to the pleasant, sunny
Hotel de la Grande Bretagne, which Howard had chosen for his Florentine
home, and soon recrossed the Arno, and swept out through Porta Romana
into the open country, behind Howard's beautiful gray horses.

The crisp, cool air brought roses into Barbara's and Bettina's cheeks,
and ruffled their pretty brown hair. Malcom was in high spirits after
his long confinement to the house, and Howard tried to throw off a
gloomy, discouraged feeling that had hung over him all the morning.
Seated opposite Barbara, and continually meeting her frank, steadfast
eyes, he seemed to realize as he had never before done the obvious truth
of Mrs. Douglas's words, when she had said that Barbara was perfectly
unconscious of his love for her; and all the manhood within him strove
to assert itself to resist an untimely discovery of his feeling, for
fear of the mischief it might cause.

Howard had been doing a great deal of new thinking during the past
weeks. He suddenly found himself surrounded by an atmosphere wholly
different from that in which he had before lived.

Sprung from an aristocratic and thoroughly egoistic ancestry on his
father's side, and a morbidly sensitive one on his mother's; brought up
by his paternal grandmother, whose every thought had been centred upon
him as the only living descendant of her family; surrounded by servants
who were the slaves of his grandmother's and his own whims; not even his
experience in the Boston Latin School, chosen because his father,
grandfather, and great-grandfather had been educated there, had served
to widen much the horizon of his daily living, or to make him anything
like a typical American youth.

Now, during the last two or three months he had been put into wholly
changed conditions. An habitual visitor to this family into whose life
he had accidentally entered, he had been a daily witness of Mrs.
Douglas's self-forgetting love, which was by no means content with
ministering to the happiness of her own loved home ones, but continually
reached out to an ever widening circle, blessing whomever it touched. He
could not be unconscious that every act of Robert Sumner's busy life was
directed by the desire to give of himself to help others; that a high
id