ur sensitive
man. He wants every one to live according to his ideas, or he
immediately begins suffering. That friend of yours hasn't the courage
of his convictions. He is going to be ashamed of the very qualities that
made him love his wife."

There was a hop that night at the hotel, quite an unusual affair as to
elegance, given in honor of a woman from New York, who wrote a novel a
month.

Mrs. Brainard looked so happy that night when she came in the parlor,
after the music had begun, that I felt a moisture gather in my eyes just
because of the beauty of her joy, and the forced vivacity of the women
about me seemed suddenly coarse and insincere. Some wonderful red
stones, brilliant as rubies, glittered in among the diaphanous black
driftings of her dress. She asked me if the stones were not very pretty,
and said she gathered them in one of her mountain river-beds.

"But the gown?" I said. "Surely, you do not gather gowns like that in
river-beds, or pick them off mountain-pines?"

"But you can get them in Denver. Father always sent to Denver for my
finery. He was very particular about how I looked. You see, I was all he
had--" She broke off, her voice faltering.

"Come over by the window," I said, to change her thought. "I have
something to repeat to you. It is a song of Sydney Lanier's. I think he
was the greatest poet that ever lived in America, though not many agree
with me. But he is my dear friend anyway, though he is dead, and I never
saw him; and I want you to hear some of his words."

I led her across to an open window. The dancers were whirling by us.
The waltz was one of those melancholy ones which speak the spirit of the
dance more eloquently than any merry melody can. The sound of the sea
booming beyond in the darkness came to us, and long paths of light, now
red, now green, stretched toward the distant light-house. These were the
lines I repeated:--

"What heartache--ne'er a hill!
Inexorable, vapid, vague, and chill
The drear sand levels drain my spirit low.
With one poor word they tell me all they know;
Whereat their stupid tongues, to tease my pain,
Do drawl it o'er and o'er again.
They hurt my heart with griefs I cannot name;
Always the same--the same."

But I got no further. I felt myself moved with a sort of passion which
did not seem to come from within, but to be communicated to me from her.
A certain unfamiliar happiness pricked through with p