l grow used to it," said little Bessy; "but, Sally, how did you
have the courage?"

"Ask Bonny how she had the courage to take that five-foot jump."

"I took it with my teeth set and my eyes shut," said Bonny.

"Well, that's how I took Ben, with my teeth set and my eyes shut tight."

"And I came down with a laugh," added Bonny.

"So did I--I came down with a laugh. Oh, you dears, how lovely the house
looks! Here are all the bridal roses that I missed and you've
remembered."

"There're blue roses in your room," said Bonny; "I mean on the chintz
and on the paper."

"How can I help being happy, when I have blue roses, Bonny? Aren't blue
roses an emblem of the impossible achieved?"

Bonny's dancing black eyes were on me, and I read in them plainly the
thought, "Yes, I'm going to be nice to you because Sally has married
you, and Sally's my cousin--even if I can't understand how she came to
do it."

No, she couldn't understand, and she never would, this I read also. The
man that she saw and the man that Sally knew were two different persons,
drawing life from two different sources of sympathy. To her I was still,
and would always be, the "magnificent animal,"--a creature of good
muscle and sinew, with an honest eye, doubtless, and clean hands, but
lacking in the finer qualities of person and manner that must appeal to
her taste. Where Sally beheld power, and admired, Bonny Page saw only
roughness, and wondered.

Presently, they led her away, and I heard their merry voices floating
down from the bedrooms above. The pink light of the candles on the
dinner table in the room beyond, the vague, sweet scent of the roses,
and the warmth of the wood fire burning on the andirons, seemed to grow
faint and distant, for I was very tired with the fatigue of a man whose
muscles are cramped from want of exercise. I felt all at once that I had
stepped from the open world into a place that was too small for me. I
was a rich man at last, I was the husband, too, of the princess of the
enchanted garden, and yet in the midst of the perfume and the soft
lights and the laughter floating down from above, I saw myself, by some
freak of memory, as I had crouched homeless in the straw under a
deserted stall in the Old Market. Would the thought of the boy I had
been haunt forever the man I had become? Did my past add a keener
happiness to my present, or hang always like a threatening shadow above
it? There was a part in my life which these g