the window, ceased chirping, and
listened to her.

Her fingers grew very busy with Mortimer's books. Having dusted them
carefully, she commenced to place them in an old black-walnut book-case,
which must have had an antique look fifty years ago. And Daisy went on
laughing and talking to herself in a most comical manner.

"Here, Mr. Theocritus!" she cried, taking up that venerable poet, and
placing him upside down, "I'll just set you on your head for absorbing all
that stupid boy's attention one live-long evening, when I wanted to chat
with him."

An author is supposed to know everything about his characters; but I cannot
tell why Daisy placed Mortimer's poet in such an uncomfortable position,
unless she thought that the blood might run into the head of Mr.
Theocritus, and cause him to be taken off with a brain fever!

"And you, Mr. Byron," Daisy continued, "you're a very wicked young fellow!
and I won't let you sit next to Mrs. Hemans!" so she placed Plutarch
between them. "But you and Shelly," Daisy said, resting her hand on Keats,
"you are different sort of persons; you are too earnest and beautiful to be
impure; and you shall sit side by side between L. E. L. and our own Alice
Cary. And Chatterton! poor boy Chatterton! I'll place you in that shadowy
corner of the book-case, where the sunshine never comes!"

So Daisy made merry or sad, as the case might be, over her lover's few
volumes; and when she had arranged them to suit her capricious self, she
kissed her hand to Tom Hood, and locked them all--poets, romancers, and
historians--in the black, sombre old book-case.

Our friend Daisy was in one of those playful, half-childish moods, which
came upon her not unfrequently.

Now she looked around the room for some other piece of useful mischief to
do. She would turn over Mortimer's papers. Ah, what made her blush and
laugh so prettily then? It was only a sheet of note-paper, on which
Mortimer, in a dreamy moment, had written her name innumerable times--for
know, good world, that true love takes the silliest ways to express itself.

Now she was curious.

She stood thoughtfully, with a small morocco case in her hand. The reader
has seen it once in Flint's office. An undefined feeling stole over her;
and it was some time before she thought of opening the case. She did so,
however, and took from it a pearl necklace of rare design and workmanship.
The necklace was in three parts, linked together by exquisitely carved