ummer, was becoming habitable. As yet but one of the hotels,
and that the worst, was prepared for guests. In a fortnight, however,
the others would begin to open their doors, and meanwhile if, in the
course of the week, he care to run up, there was a room in the cottage
at his disposal.

"In the course of the week," soliloquized Tristrem; "h'm--well, this
afternoon is in the course of it, and this afternoon will I go."

Pleasured by the artfulness of his own sophistry, he procured a
provision of _langues dorees_, a comestible of which she was fond, found
at Tiffany's the ruby and opal set in accordance with orders already
given, and at two o'clock boarded the Newport express.

The train reached New London before Tristrem had so much as glanced at a
volume which he held in his hand. He had little need of anything to
occupy his thoughts. His mind was a scenario in which he followed the
changes and convolutions of an entertainment more alluring than any that
romancer or playwright could convey. He was in that mood which we all of
us have experienced, in which life seems not only worth living, but a
fountain of delight as well. Were ever fields more green or sky more
fair? And such a promise as the future held! In his hearing was a choir
of thrushes, and on his spirit had been thrown a mantle so subtle, yet
of texture so insistent, that no thought not wholly pure could pierce
the woof or find a vantage-ground therein. He was in that mood in which
one feels an ascension of virtues, the companionship of unviolated
illusions, the pomp and purple of worship, a communion with all that is
best, a repulsion of all that is base--that mood in which hymns mount
unsummoned from the heart.

He was far away, but the Ideal was at his side. The past was a mirror,
mirroring nothing save his own preparation and the dream of the coming
of her. And now she had come, fairer than the fairest vision and desire
that ever visited a poet starving in a garret. To be worthy of her, even
in the slightest measure, what was there that he would leave undone? And
as the train brought him to his journey's end, he repeated to himself,
gravely and decorously, and with the earnestness and sincerity of the
untried, the grave covenants of the marriage pact.

On descending at the station he remembered, for the first time, that he
had omitted to send Miss Raritan an avant-courier in the shape of a
telegram. It is one of the oddities of hazard that, in turning