never been quite so happy.
And this going away struck him as being a rather cruel piece of
business. To tell the whole truth, he couldn't understand why she should
go at all.

He felt it more and more, as he sat at dinner with his old friends, the
Englishes, and ate with less relish than common the delicious Yorkshire
pudding and drank the musty ale. He felt it as he accompanied his
friends to the theater, where he sat with Mrs. English, while she
watched with pride the husband whose impersonations she was never weary
of witnessing; but Paul seemed to see him without recognizing him, and
even the familiar voice sounded unfamiliar, or like a voice in a dream.
He felt it more and more when good Mrs. English gave him a nudge toward
the end of the evening and called him "a stupid," half in sport and half
in earnest; and when he had delivered that excellent woman into the care
of her liege lord and had seen them securely packed into the horse-car
that was to drag them tediously homeward in company with a great
multitude of suffocating fellow-sufferers, he felt it; and all the way
out the dark street and up the hill that ran, or seemed to run, into
outer darkness--where his home was--he felt as if he had never been the
man he was until now, and that it was all for _her_ sake and through
_her_ influence that this sudden and unexpected transformation had come
to pass. And it seemed to him that if he were not to see her again,
very soon, his life would be rendered valueless; and that only to see
her were worth all the honor and glory that he had ever aspired to in
his wildest dreams; and that to be near her always and to feel that he
were much--nay, everything--to her, as before God he felt that at that
moment she was to him, would make his life one long Elysium, and to
death would add a thousand stings.

II

Saadi had no hand in it, yet all Persia could not outdo it. The whole
valley ran to roses. They covered the earth; they fell from lofty
trellises in fragrant cataracts; they played over the rustic arbors like
fountains of color and perfume; they clambered to the cottage roof and
scattered their bright petals in showers upon the grass. They were of
every tint and texture; of high and low degree, modest or haughty as the
case might be--but roses all of them, and such roses as California alone
can boast. And some were fat or _passe_, and more's the pity, but all
were fragrant, and the name of that sweet vale was Santa Ros