rub, he pushed the silver swiftly back.

"It is a gift!" said he, with spirit.

"No, no," said Eve. "I should like it, but I must pay for it. You will
be so kind as to take the price?" she asked, her hand extended, and a
winning grace irradiating all her changing rosy countenance.

A shadow fell over the boy's face, like that of a cloud skimming down a
sunny landscape.

"_A Lei non posso dar un rifiuto_," said he, meeting her shining eyes;
and he gravely gathered the money and slung his tray.

As he raised it, Eve laid along its side a branch of unsullied
day-lilies that had been filling the room with their heavy fragrance.
The image-boy interested her; he was a visible creature of those foreign
fairy-shores of which she had dreamed; that she did anything but show
kindness to a vagrant whom she would not see again never crossed her
mind; perhaps, too, she liked that Italy, in his person, should admire
her,--that was pardonable. But, at the action, the shadow swept away
from the boy's face again, all his lights and darks came flashing out,
eyes and teeth and color sparkling in his smile, like sunshine after
rain; he made his low obeisance, poised the tray upon his head, and,
with a wave of his hand, went out.

"_A rivederla_!" he called back to her from the door, and was gone.

And soon far down the street they heard his musical cry again; and
perhaps the little distant dove, who had forsaken him on entrance, also
caught the sound, and was reminded by it, as he pecked along the dusty
thoroughfare, of some remote and pleasant memory of morning and the
market-place.

* * * * *

It was a week afterward, that, as Eve and her mother loitered over
luncheon, the door again softly opened, and they saw Luigi standing
erect on the threshold, and holding with both hands above the brightly
bronzed face a tall, slender, white jar of ancient and exquisite shape,
carefully painted, and having a glass suspended within, lest any water
it might receive should penetrate the porous plaster.

He did not look at Eve, but marched to her mother, and deposited it upon
the floor at her feet.

"For the Signora's lilies," said he.

And remembering the silver pieces of the week before, and fearing lest
she should really grieve him, the Signora perforce accepted it with
admiring words; while Eve ran to fill it from the garden, into which
abode of bliss--as gardens always are--the long casement of the
musi