id to dawdle with Anna--with Anna Callender--"

"Oh!" broke in the girl, a hot blush betraying her own heart, "I don't
think you've got the thing right at all. Why, it's Anna who's making the
trouble! The dawdling is all hers! Oh, I have it from the best
authority, though I'm not at liberty--"

"My dear girl, you've been misled. The fault is all his. I know it from
one who can't be mistaken."

The damsel blushed worse. "Well, at any rate," she said, "the case
doesn't in any slightest way involve Miss Valcour."

"Oh, I know that!" was the cocksure reply as they alighted in Canal
Street to take an up-town mule-car.

Could Madame and Flora have overheard, how they would have smiled to
each other.

With now a wary forward step and now a long pause, and now another short
step and another pause, Hilary, in his letters to Anna, despite Flora's
often successful contrivings, had ventured back toward that
understanding for which the souls of both were starving, until at
length he had sent one which seemed, itself, to kneel, for him, at her
feet--would have seemed, had it not miscarried. But, by no one's craft,
merely through the "terribleness" of the times, it had gone forever
astray. When, not knowing this, he despatched another, this latter had
promptly arrived, but its unintelligible allusions to lines in the lost
forerunner were unpardonable for lack of that forerunner's light, and it
contained especially one remark--trivial enough--which, because written
in the irrepressible facetiousness so inborn in him, but taken, alas! in
the ineradicable earnest so natural to her, had compelled her to reply
in words which made her as they went, and him as they smote him, seem
truly to have "aged three years in one." Yet hardly had they left her
before you would have said she had recovered the whole three years and a
fraction over, on finding a postscript, till then most unaccountably
overlooked, which said that its writer had at that moment been ordered
(as soon as he could accomplish this and that and so and so) to hasten
home to recruit the battery with men of his own choice, and incidentally
to bring the wounded Charlie with him. Such godsends raise the
spring-tides of praise and human kindness in us, and it was on the very
next morning, after finding that postscript, that there had come to Anna
her splendid first thought of the Bazaar.

And now behold it, a visible reality! Unlighted as yet, unpeopled, but
gorgeous, multifor