he
first day. The second, I began to understand it."

"Do make me understand it!"

"If you will come here at five o'clock to-morrow, Mr. Leno--xin the
morning, I mean,--and will watch the wonderful sunrise, the waking up
of land and sea; if you will stay here then patiently till ten o'clock,
and see the changes and the colours on everything--let the sea and the
sky speak to you, as they will; then they will tell you--all you can
understand!"

"All I can understand. H'm! May I go home for breakfast?"

"Perhaps you must; but you will wish you need not."

"Will you be here?"

"No," said Lois. "I will be somewhere else."

"But I couldn't stand such a long talk with myself as that," said the
young man.

"It was a talk with Nature I recommended to you."

"All the same. Nature says queer things if you let her alone."

"Best listen to them, then."

"Why?"

"She tells you the truth."

"Do you like the truth?"

"Certainly. Of course. Do not you?"

"_Always?_"

"Yes, always. Do not you?"

"It's fearfully awkward!" said the young man.

"Yes, isn't it?" Tom echoed.

"Do you like falsehood, Mr. Lenox?"

"I dare not say what I like--in this presence. Miss Lothrop, I am very
much afraid you are a Puritan."

"What is a Puritan?" asked Lois simply.

"He doesn't know!" said Tom. "You needn't ask him."

"I will ask you then, for I do not know. What does he mean by it?"

"He doesn't know that," said Lenox, laughing. "I will tell you, Miss
Lothrop--if I can. A Puritan is a person so much better than the
ordinary run of mortals, that she is not afraid to let Nature and
Solitude speak to her--dares to look roses in the face, in fact;--has
no charity for the crooked ways of the world or for the people
entangled in them; a person who can bear truth and has no need of
falsehood, and who is thereby lifted above the multitudes of this
world's population, and stands as it were alone."

"I'll report that speech to Julia," said Tom, laughing.

"But that is not what a 'Puritan' generally means, is it?" said Lois.
They both laughed now at the quain't simplicity with which this was
spoken.

"That is what it _is_," Tom answered.

"I do not think the term is complimentary," Lois went on, shaking her
head, "however Mr. Lenox's explanation may be. Isn't it ten o'clock?"

"Near eleven."

"Then I must go in."

The two gentlemen accompanied her, making themselves very pleasant by
the way. Lenox asked her about flowers