d Margaret, with a laugh that was too genuine to be
consoling, "that you were traveling for comfort; I thought it was for
information."

"And I am getting a great deal," said Mr. Lyon, rather ruefully. "I'm
trying to find out where. I ought to have been born."

"I'm not sure," Margaret said, half seriously, "but you would have been a
very good American."

This was not much of an admission, after all, but it was the most that
Margaret had ever made, and Mr. Lyon tried to get some encouragement out
of it. But he felt, as any man would feel, that this beating about the
bush, this talk of nationality and all that, was nonsense; that if a
woman loved a man she wouldn't care where he was born; that all the world
would be as nothing to him; that all conditions and obstacles society and
family could raise would melt away in the glow of a real passion. And he
wondered for a moment if American girls were not "calculating"--a word to
which he had learned over here to attach a new and comical meaning.

V

The afternoon after this conversation Miss Forsythe was sitting reading
in her favorite window-seat when Mr. Lyon was announced. Margaret was at
her school. There was nothing un usual in this afternoon call; Mr. Lyon's
visits had become frequent and informal; but Miss Forsythe had a nervous
presentiment that something important was to happen, that showed itself
in her greeting, and which was perhaps caught from a certain new
diffidence in his manner.

Perhaps the maiden lady preserves more than any other this sensitiveness,
inborn in women, to the approach of the critical moment in the affairs of
the heart. The day may some time be past when she--is sensitive for
herself--philosophers say otherwise--but she is easily put in a flutter
by the affair of another. Perhaps this is because the negative (as we say
in these days) which takes impressions retains all its delicacy from the
fact that none of them have ever been developed, and perhaps it is a wise
provision of nature that age in a heart unsatisfied should awaken lively
apprehensive curiosity and sympathy about the manifestation of the tender
passion in others. It certainly is a note of the kindliness and charity
of the maiden mind that its sympathies are so apt to be most strongly
excited in the success of the wooer. This interest may be quite separable
from the common feminine desire to make a match whenever there is the
least chance of it. Miss Forsythe was not a