I tell Leonard, dear?"

"You told him not to confess certain anxieties, even if they were
justified."

"Oh, Arthur!"

"I see my folly, dearest. But Isabel, he ought not to have answered that
the more they were justified, the more they should go unconfessed!"

"Oh, Arthur! the merest, idlest prattle! What meaning could you"--

"None, Isabel, none! Only, my good angel, I so ill deserve you that with
every breath I draw I have a desperate fright of losing you, and a
hideous resentment against whoever could so much as think to rob me of
you."

"Why, dear heart, don't you know that couldn't be done?"

"Oh, I know it, you being what you are, even though I am only what I am.
But, Isabel, you know he loves you. No human soul is strong enough to
blow out the flame of the love you kindle, Isabel Morris, as one would
blow out his bedroom candle and go to sleep at the stroke of a clock."

"Arthur, I believe Leonard--and I do not say it in his praise--I believe
Leonard can do that!"

"No, not so, not so! Leonard is strong, but the fire of a strong man's
love, however smothered, burns on without mercy, my beautiful, and you
cannot go in and out of that burning house as though it were not on
fire."

"And shall Leonard, then, not be our nearest and best friend, as we had
planned?"

"He shall, Isabel. Ah yes; not one smallest part of your sweet
friendship will I take from him, nor of his from you. For, Isabel,
though he were as weak as I"--

"As weak as _I_, you should say, dear. You are not weak, Arthur,
are you?"

"Weak as the bending grass, Isabel, under this load of love. But though
he, I say, were as weak as I, you--ah, you!--are as wise as you are
bewitching; and if I should speak to you from my most craven fear, I
could find but one word of warning."

"Oh, you dear, blind flatterer! And what word would that be?"

"That you are most bewitching when you are wisest."

As Isabel softly laughed she cast a dreaming glance behind, and noticed
that she and Arthur were quite hidden in the flowery undergrowth of the
hill path. They kissed.

"Beloved," said her worshipper, with a clouded smile, as he let her down
from her tiptoes, "do you know you took that as though you were thinking
of something else?"

"Did I? Oh, I didn't mean to."

Such a reply only darkened the cloud. "Of whom were you thinking,
Isabel?"

She blushed. "I was think--thinking--why, I was--I--I was
think--thinking"--she went redder and redder