enerally brief. Tom came with the carriage once a week,
according to his master's orders; but she found solitary drives so
little refreshing to body or mind that she was often glad to avail
herself of Tulee's company.

So the summer wore away, and September came to produce a new aspect of
beauty in the landscape, by tinging the fading flowers and withering
leaves with various shades of brown and crimson, purple and orange.
One day, early in the month, when Tom came with the carriage, she told
him to drive to Magnolia Lawn. She had long been wishing to revisit
the scene where she had been so happy on that bright spring day; but
she had always said to herself, "I will wait till Gerald comes." Now
she had grown so weary with hope deferred, that she felt as if she
could wait no longer.

As she rode along she thought of improvements in the walks that she
would suggest to Gerald, if they ever went there to live, as he had
intimated they might. The servants received her with their usual
respectful manner and wondering looks; but when she turned back to
ask some question, she saw them whispering together with an unusual
appearance of excitement. Her cheeks glowed with a consciousness that
her anomalous position was well calculated to excite their curiosity;
and she turned away, thinking how different it had been with her
mother,--how sheltered and protected she had always been. She
remembered how very rarely her father left home, and how he always
hastened to return. She stood awhile on the veranda, thinking sadly,
"If Gerald loves me as Papasito loved Mamita, how can he be contented
to leave me so much?" With a deep sigh she turned and entered the
house through an open window. The sigh changed at once to a bright
smile. The parlor had undergone a wondrous transformation since she
last saw it. The woodwork had been freshly painted, and the walls were
covered with silvery-flowered paper. Over curtains of embroidered lace
hung a drapery of apple-green damask, ornamented with deep white-silk
fringe and heavy tassels. "How kind of Gerald!" murmured she. "He has
done this because I expressed a wish to live here. How ungrateful I
was to doubt him in my thoughts!"

She passed into the chamber, where she found a white French bedstead,
on which were painted bouquets of roses. It was enveloped in roseate
lace drapery, caught up at the centre in festoons on the silver arrow
of a pretty little Cupid. From silver arrows over the windows