st tribute which a lover lays at the
feet of his lady is, in ordinary, the stamped-upon and abused summary of
his personal attributes, which, in his own mind, he has taken remarkable
pains to render as despicable as possible, and which, in hers, her
imagination contrives not only to rehabilitate, but to imbue with a
preposterously exaggerated splendor.

"I wonder," added the Lieutenant-Governor presently, "whether when
gentlemen are invited to tea they are supposed to kiss the hostess on
entering."

"If you are in any doubt about it," observed Natalie, with an air of
superb indifference, "I advise you to write for advice to the etiquette
editor of the 'Kenton City Record.' She is probably sixty-two years old,
looks like an English walnut, has never had a proposal in her life, and
so knows all about"--

What the lady in question was supposed to know all about was for
sufficient reasons never made clear. There are occasions, despite the
manuals of polite behavior, when interruption cannot with any approach
to justice be regarded as rudeness.

Barclay heaved a long sigh of satisfaction as he took his tea and two
thin slices of toast and settled himself in his chair.

"Do you think it possible," he asked, "for a man to be asleep for six
weeks, dreaming that he is in another garden of Eden, with an Eve in a
French frock, who has no partiality for apples"--

"I _adore_ apples!" said the girl.

"And then wake up," he continued, disregarding the interruption, "and
find that the dream was only a dream, after all,--that he's only a poor
dog of a politician, that the garden is only a dingy office, and the
flower-beds full of briers and pitfalls?"

"You've been eating pie for lunch again," said Natalie severely, "and it
always makes you morbid. No; I don't think it possible at all. If I did,
I should hang on to your coattails like fury and keep you in dreamland,
whether you wanted to wake up or not."

"It's all too good to be true! How _dare_ you be so beautiful?"

"John"--

"It's gospel truth!"

Barclay paused for a moment, and then went on more seriously.

"You're tired, littlest and most lovely in the world, and troubled about
something."

Natalie laughed shortly, with evident effort.

"Why do you say that?" she asked.

"Why not? Don't you suppose I know? Do you think you could say a hundred
words without my perceiving that? It almost seems to me that the
knowledge that you were unhappy would make its way to