und one knee, gazing towards the dim ray-strewn valley.

"An odd creature!" muttered the wise youth. "She's as odd as any of
them. She ought to be a Feverel. I suppose she's graduating for it. Hang
that confounded old ass of a Benson! He has had the impudence to steal a
march on me!"

The shadow of the cypress was lessening on the lake. The moon was
climbing high. As Richard rowed the boat, Lucy, sang to him softly. She
sang first a fresh little French song, reminding him of a day when she
had been asked to sing to him before, and he did not care to hear. "Did
I live?" he thinks. Then she sang to him a bit of one of those majestic
old Gregorian chants, that, wherever you may hear them, seem to build up
cathedral walls about you. The young man dropped the sculls. The strange
solemn notes gave a religions tone to his love, and wafted him into the
knightly ages and the reverential heart of chivalry.

Hanging between two heavens on the lake: floating to her voice: the moon
stepping over and through white shoal's of soft high clouds above and
below: floating to her void--no other breath abroad! His soul went out
of his body as he listened.

They must part. He rows her gently shoreward.

"I never was so happy as to-night," she murmurs.

"Look, my Lucy. The lights of the old place are on the lake. Look where
you are to live."

"Which is your room, Richard?"

He points it out to her.

"O Richard! that I were one of the women who wait on you! I should ask
nothing more. How happy she must be!"

"My darling angel-love. You shall be happy; but all shall wait on you,
and I foremost, Lucy."

"Dearest! may I hope for a letter?"

"By eleven to-morrow. And I?"

"Oh! you will have mine, Richard."

"Tom shall wait far it. A long one, mind! Did you like my last song?"

She pats her hand quietly against her bosom, and he knows where it
rests. O love! O heaven!

They are aroused by the harsh grating of the bow of the boat against the
shingle. He jumps out, and lifts her ashore.

"See!" she says, as the blush of his embrace subsides--"See!" and
prettily she mimics awe and feels it a little, "the cypress does point
towards us. O Richard! it does!"

And he, looking at her rather than at the cypress, delighting in her
arch grave ways--

"Why, there's hardly any shadow at all, Lucy. She mustn't dream, my
darling! or dream only of me."

"Dearest! but I do."

"To-morrow, Lucy! The letter in the morning, and you at night.