e the rudbeckias grew?"

"I remember it," she answered, a girlish blush rising to her face.

"If I were to say to thee now what I said to thee there, what would be
thy answer?"

Her words came brokenly.

"I would say to thee, Richard,--'I can trust thee,--I DO love thee!'"

"Look at me, Asenath."

Her eyes, beaming with a clearer light than even then when she first
confessed, were lifted to his. She placed her hands gently upon his
shoulders, and bent her head upon his breast. He tenderly lifted it
again, and, for the first time, her virgin lips knew the kiss of man.

MISS BARTRAM'S TROUBLE.

I.

It was a day of unusual excitement at the Rambo farm-house. On the farm,
it is true, all things were in their accustomed order, and all growths
did their accustomed credit to the season. The fences were in good
repair; the cattle were healthy and gave promise of the normal increase,
and the young corn was neither strangled with weeds nor assassinated
by cut-worms. Old John Rambo was gradually allowing his son, Henry, to
manage in his stead, and the latter shrewdly permitted his father to
believe that he exercised the ancient authority. Leonard Clare, the
strong young fellow who had been taken from that shiftless adventurer,
his father, when a mere child, and brought up almost as one of the
family, and who had worked as a joiner's apprentice during the previous
six months, had come back for the harvest work; so the Rambos were
forehanded, and probably as well satisfied as it is possible for
Pennsylvania farmers to be.

In the house, also, Mrs. Priscilla Rambo was not severely haunted by
the spectre of any neglected duty. The simple regular routine of the
household could not be changed under her charge; each thing had its
appropriate order of performance, must be done, and WAS done. If
the season were backward, at the time appointed for whitewashing or
soap-making, so much the worse for the season; if the unhatched goslings
were slain by thunder, she laid the blame on the thunder. And if--but
no, it is quite impossible to suppose that, outside of those two
inevitable, fearful house-cleaning weeks in each year, there could have
been any disorder in the cold prim, varnish-odored best rooms, sacred to
company.

It was Miss Betty Rambo, whose pulse beat some ten strokes faster than
its wont, as she sat down with the rest to their early country dinner.
Whether her brother Henry's participated in the accelerat