al indulgence must be conceded to those in Evelina's state since
she had had her own fleeting vision of such mysterious longings as the
words betrayed.

Evelina, meanwhile, had taken the bundle of dried grasses out of the
broken china vase, and was putting the jonquils in their place with
touches that lingered down their smooth stems and blade-like leaves.

"Ain't they pretty?" she kept repeating as she gathered the flowers into
a starry circle. "Seems as if spring was really here, don't it?"

Ann Eliza remembered that it was Mr. Ramy's evening.

When he came, the Teutonic eye for anything that blooms made him turn at
once to the jonquils.

"Ain't dey pretty?" he said. "Seems like as if de spring was really
here."

"Don't it?" Evelina exclaimed, thrilled by the coincidence of their
thought. "It's just what I was saying to my sister."

Ann Eliza got up suddenly and moved away; she remembered that she had
not wound the clock the day before. Evelina was sitting at the table;
the jonquils rose slenderly between herself and Mr. Ramy.

"Oh," she murmured with vague eyes, "how I'd love to get away somewheres
into the country this very minute--somewheres where it was green and
quiet. Seems as if I couldn't stand the city another day." But Ann Eliza
noticed that she was looking at Mr. Ramy, and not at the flowers.

"I guess we might go to Cendral Park some Sunday," their visitor
suggested. "Do you ever go there, Miss Evelina?"

"No, we don't very often; leastways we ain't been for a good while." She
sparkled at the prospect. "It would be lovely, wouldn't it, Ann Eliza?"

"Why, yes," said the elder sister, coming back to her seat.

"Well, why don't we go next Sunday?" Mr. Ramy continued. "And we'll
invite Miss Mellins too--that'll make a gosy little party."

That night when Evelina undressed she took a jonquil from the vase
and pressed it with a certain ostentation between the leaves of her
prayer-book. Ann Eliza, covertly observing her, felt that Evelina was
not sorry to be observed, and that her own acute consciousness of the
act was somehow regarded as magnifying its significance.

The following Sunday broke blue and warm. The Bunner sisters were
habitual church-goers, but for once they left their prayer-books on the
what-not, and ten o'clock found them, gloved and bonneted, awaiting Miss
Mellins's knock. Miss Mellins presently appeared in a glitter of jet
sequins and spangles, with a tale of having seen a stran