ssy trunk, "is it you? I have been seeking you, and what sprite sends
you to me?"

"I thought you were going away," she said, abruptly.

"That is a broken paving-stone," he answered, seating himself beside
her, and throwing his hat on the grass.

"You asked me, yesterday, if I confessed to being a myth," she said,
after a time. "If I should go back to Martinique, I should become one in
your remembrance,--should I not? You would think of me just as you would
have thought of the Dryad yesterday, if she had stepped from the tree
and stepped back again?"

"Are you going to Martinique?" he asked, with a total change of face and
manner.

"I don't know. I am tired of this; and I cannot live on an ice-field. I
had such life at the South! It is 'as if a rose should shut and be a bud
again.' I need my native weather, heat and sea."

"How can you go to Martinique?"

"Oh, I forgot!"

Mr. Raleigh did not reply, and they both sat listening to the faint
night-side noises of the world.

"You are very quiet," he said at last, ceasing to fling waifs upon the
stream.

"And you could be very gay, I believe."

"Yes. I am full of exuberant spirits. Do you know what day it is?"

"It is my birthday."

"It is _my_ birthday!"

"How strange! The Jews would tell you that this sweet first of August
was the birthday of the world.

"''Tis like the birthday of the world,
When earth was born in bloom,'"--

she sang, but paused before her voice should become hoarse in tears.

"Do you know what you promised me on my birthday? I am going to claim
it."

"The present. You shall have a cast which I had made from one of
my mother's fancies or bas-reliefs,--she only does the front of
anything,--a group of fleurs-de-lis whose outlines make a child's face,
my face."

"It is more than any likeness in stone or pencil that I shall ask of
you."

"What then?"

"You cannot imagine?"

"_Monsieur_" she whispered, turning toward him, and blushing in the
twilight, "_est ce que c'est moi?_"

There came out the low west-wind singing to itself through the leaves,
the drone of a late-carousing honey-bee, the lapping of the water on the
shore, the song of the wood-thrush replete with the sweetness of its
half-melody; and ever and anon the pensive cry of the whippoorwill
fluted across the deepening silence that summoned all these murmurs
into hearing. A rustle like the breeze in the birches passed, and Mrs.
Purcell retarded her rapid step t