ace. He had always liked tall women.

And all this time he was trying to frame a suitable letter to the real
"popular and accomplished Miss Musgrove," of Claybank Academy.

Finally, however, the ambitious and flowery document was finished.

It would be unfair to him whose postscript read, "For Your Eyes alone,"
to quote in full, for the vulgar gratification of prying eyes, the
pathetic missive that told again the old story of a lonely home, the
needed woman. But when it was sent, Ezra found the circuit of the
butter-bean arbor too circumscribed a promenade, and began taking the
imaginary Miss Myrtle with him down through his orchard and
potato-patch.

It was during these moonlight communings that he seemed to discover that
she listened while he talked--a new experience to Ezra--and that even
when he expressed his awful doubts as to the existence of a personal
devil she only smiled, and thought he might be right.

Oh, the joy of such companionship! But, oh, the slowness of the mails!

A month passed, and Ezra was beginning to give up all hope of ever
having an answer to his letter, when one day it came, a dainty envelope
with the Claybank postmark.

Miss Musgrove thanked him for his letter. She would see him. It would
not be convenient now, but would he not come down to the academy's
closing exercises in June--a month later? Until then she was very
respectfully his friend, Myrtle Musgrove.

The next month was the longest in Ezra's life. Still, the Lord's
calendar is faithful, and the sun not a waiter upon the moods of men.

In twenty-nine days exactly a timid little man stood with throbbing
heart at the door of Claybank Academy, and in a moment more he had
slipped into a back seat of the crowded room, where a young orator was
ringing Poe's "Bells" through all the varying cadences of his changing
voice to a rapt audience of relations and friends. Here unobserved Ezra
hoped to recover his self-possession, remove the beads of perspiration
one by one from his brow with a corner of his neatly folded
handkerchief, and perhaps from this vantage-ground even enjoy the
delight of recognizing Miss Myrtle without an introduction.

He had barely deposited his hat beneath his chair when there burst upon
his delighted vision a radiant, dark-eyed, red-haired creature in pink,
sitting head and shoulders above her companions on a bench set at right
angles with the audience seats, in front of the house. There were a
number of wo