for when these are given they can never be taken back again, and
the person to whom these are given is not any richer, but the giver is
made poor and abashed. I gave my love to a man who did not want it.
I told him of my love, and he lifted his eyelids at me; that is my
trouble."

For a moment the Philosopher sat in stricken silence looking on the
ground. He had a strange disinclination to look at the girl although he
felt her eyes fixed steadily on him. But in a little while he did look
at her and spoke again.

"To carry gifts to an ungrateful person cannot be justified and need not
be mourned for. If your love is noble why do you treat it meanly? If it
is lewd the man was right to reject it."

"We love as the wind blows," she replied.

"There is a thing," said the Philosopher, "and it is both the biggest
and the littlest thing in the world."

"What is that?" said the girl.

"It is pride," he answered. "It lives in an empty house. The head which
has never been visited by the heart is the house pride lives in. You
are in error, my dear, and not in love. Drive out the knave pride, put a
flower in your hair and walk freely again."

The girl laughed, and suddenly her pale face became rosy as the dawn and
as radiant and lovely as a cloud. She shed warmth and beauty about her
as she leaned forward.

"You are wrong," she whispered, "because he does love me; but he does
not know it yet. He is young and full of fury, and has no time to look
at women, but he looked at me. My heart knows it and my head knows it,
but I am impatient and yearn for him to look at me again. His heart will
remember me to-morrow, and he will come searching for me with prayers
and tears, with shouts and threats. I will be very hard to find
to-morrow when he holds out his arms to the air and the sky, and is
astonished and frightened to find me nowhere. I will hide from him
to-morrow, and frown at him when he speaks, and turn aside when he
follows me: until the day after to-morrow when he will frighten me with
his anger, and hold me with his furious hands, and make me look at him."

Saying this the girl arose and prepared to go away.

"He is in that house," said she, "and I would not let him see me here
for anything in the world."

"You have wasted all my time," said the Philosopher, smiling.

"What else is time for?" said the girl, and she kissed the Philosopher
and ran swiftly down the road.

She had been gone but a few moments when a ma