out into
the night, more brightly from the contrast.

She did not speak and he crunched under his feet, purposely, the turf
he was standing on, and so carrying out, naturally, the gesture of
clasping the air, in establishing his balance--as if it was an
accident.

She let him believe she thought it was, and secured relief from the
incident.

"Alice--Alice!" he exclaimed. "I love you--love you--I must have you
in my life! Can you not wear this now? See!"

He tried to place it on her finger. He held the small beautiful hand
in his own. Then it suddenly withdrew itself and left him holding his
ring and looking wonderingly at her.

She had thrown back her head, and, half turned, was looking toward
the crepe-myrtle tree from which the faint odor came.

"You had better go, Richard," was all she said.

"I'll come for my answer--soon?" he asked.

She was silent.

"Soon?" he repeated as he rose in the stirrup--"soon--and to claim
you always, Alice."

He rode off and left her standing with her head still thrown back,
her thoughtful face drinking in the odor of the crepe-myrtle.

Travis did not understand, for no crepe-myrtle had ever come into his
life. It could not come. With him all life had been a passion flower,
with the rank, strong odor of the sensuous, wild honeysuckle, which
must climb ever upon something else, in order to open and throw off
the rank, brazen perfume from its yellow and streaked and variegated
blossoms.

And how common and vulgar and all-surfeiting it is, loading the air
around it with its sickening imitation of sweetness, so that even the
bees stagger as they pass through it and disdain to stop and shovel,
for the mere asking, its musky and illicit honey.

But, O mystic odor of the crepe-myrtle--O love which never dies--how
differently it grows and lives and blooms!

In color, constant--a deep pink. Not enough of red to suggest the
sensual, nor yet lacking in it when the full moment of ripeness
comes. How delicately pink it is, and yet how unfadingly it stands
the summer's sun, the hot air, the drought! How quickly it responds
to the Autumn showers, and long after the honeysuckle has died, and
the bees have forgotten its rank memory, this beautiful creature of
love blooms in the very lap of Winter.

O love that defies even the breath of death!

The yellow lips of the honeysuckle are thick and sensual; but the
beautiful petals of this cluster of love-cells, all so daintily
transparen