are three more of them, out in
the garden, who have been talking of nothing, for the last hour, but the
pedigrees of horses and the muscles of men. When we are married, Arnold,
don't present any of your male friends to me, unless they have turned
fifty. What shall we do till luncheon-time? It's cool and quiet in here
among the books. I want a mild excitement--and I have got absolutely
nothing to do. Suppose you read me some poetry?"

"While _he_ is here?" asked Arnold, pointing to the personified
antithesis of poetry--otherwise to Geoffrey, seated with his back to
them at the farther end of the library.

"Pooh!" said Blanche. "There's only an animal in the room. We needn't
mind _him!_"

"I say!" exclaimed Arnold. "You're as bitter, this morning, as Sir
Patrick himself. What will you say to Me when we are married if you talk
in that way of my friend?"

Blanche stole her hand into Arnold's hand and gave it a little
significant squeeze. "I shall always be nice to _you,_" she
whispered--with a look that contained a host of pretty promises in
itself. Arnold returned the look (Geoffrey was unquestionably in the
way!). Their eyes met tenderly (why couldn't the great awkward brute
write his letters somewhere else?). With a faint little sigh, Blanche
dropped resignedly into one of the comfortable arm-chairs--and asked
once more for "some poetry," in a voice that faltered softly, and with a
color that was brighter than usual.

"Whose poetry am I to read?" inquired Arnold.

"Any body's," said Blanche. "This is another of my impulses. I am dying
for some poetry. I don't know whose poetry. And I don't know why."

Arnold went straight to the nearest book-shelf, and took down the first
volume that his hand lighted on--a solid quarto, bound in sober brown.

"Well?" asked Blanche. "What have you found?"

Arnold opened the volume, and conscientiously read the title exactly as
it stood:

"Paradise Lost. A Poem. By John Milton."

"I have never read Milton," said Blanche. "Have you?"

"No."

"Another instance of sympathy between us. No educated person ought to be
ignorant of Milton. Let us be educated persons. Please begin."

"At the beginning?"

"Of course! Stop! You musn't sit all that way off--you must sit where
I can look at you. My attention wanders if I don't look at people while
they read."

Arnold took a stool at Blanche's feet, and opened the "First Book" of
Paradise Lost. His "system" as a reader of blank ver