youth and joy must fall like flowers,
And leave thee sorrowing, sorrowing!

"Ye fleeting hours, ye sacred skies,
Sweet airs around her hovering,
Oh, open me the envied eyes
Your spells are covering, covering!

"Or only, while the dew's soft showers
Shake slowly into glistening,
Let her, O magic midnight hours,
In dreams be listening, listening!"

And their voices blended so together as they sang, and the plunge of the
sea came on the east-wind in such chiming chord, that they never heeded
the old mandolin whose strings in humble remoteness Luigi struck to
their tune. But mingling the sound of the sea and the sound of the
strings in her memory, it seemed to Eve that Luigi was fast becoming the
undertone of her life.

* * * * *

But Luigi was not to be abashed. Faint heart never won fair lady, he
said to himself, in some answering apophthegm. And thereat he summoned
his reserves.

At noon of the next day, Eve, having run down-stairs into the room where
her mother sat, stood before her during the inspection of the attire she
had proposed as possible for an approaching masquerade some weeks hence.
She wore a white robe of classic make, and over its trailing folds her
bright hair, all unbound from the heavy braids, streamed in a thousand
ripples of scattered lustre, the brown breaking into gold, the gloss
lurking in tremulous jacinth shadows, tresses like a cascade of ravelled
light falling to her feet, shrouding her in a long and luminous
veil,--such "sweet shaken hair" as was never seen since Spenser and
Ariosto put their heads together.

"_Come sta_?" said some one in the doorway. And there stood Luigi,
having deposited his tray of images on the steps, holding up a long
string of birds'-eggs blown, tiny varicolored globes plundered from the
thrushes, bobolinks, blue-jays, and cedar-birds, and trembling upon the
thread as if their concrete melody quivered to open into tune.

For an indignant instant Eve felt her seclusion unwarrantably violated;
she turned upon the invader with her blushes, and the venturesome Luigi
blenched before the gaze. Still, though he retreated, a part of him
remained: a slender brown hand, that stretched back in relief against
the white door-post, yet suspended the pretty rosary; and there it
caught Eve's eye.

Now it was Euterpe that Eve was to represent at the masquerade; and what
ornament so fit and fancif