ng any
more of those expensive flowers. I suppose it is selfish in me, but I
can't bear to have any of his friends do more for him than I can."

"I won't bring any more, of course, if it troubles you, and I thank you
very much for letting me come. Good-morning, Miss Pinckney." He bowed
and walked away.

Putnam availed himself discreetly of the permission given. He came
occasionally of an afternoon, and sat for an hour at a time. Usually she
said little. Her silence appeared to proceed not from reserve, but from
dejection. Sometimes she spoke of her brother. Putnam learned that he
had been her only near relative. Their parents had died in her
childhood, and she had come North with her brother when he entered the
medical school. From something that she once said Putnam inferred that
her brother had owned an annuity which died with him, and that she had
been left with little or nothing. They had few acquaintances in the
North, almost none in the city. An aunt in the South had offered her a
home, and she was going there in the fall. She looked forward with dread
to the time of her departure.

"It will be so cruel," she said, "to leave my poor boy all alone here
among strangers, and I never away from him before."

"Don't think of it now," he answered, "and when you are gone I will come
here often and see to everything."

Her bereavement had evidently benumbed all her faculties and left her
with a slight hold on life. She had no hopes or wishes for the future.
In alluding to her brother she confused her tenses, speaking of him
sometimes in the past, and sometimes in the present as of one still
alive. Putnam felt that in a girl of her age this mood was too unnatural
to last, and he reckoned not unreasonably on the reaction that must come
when her youth began again to assert its rights. He was now thoroughly
in love, and as he sat watching her beautiful abstracted face he found
it hard to keep back some expression of tenderness. Often, too, it was
difficult for him to tone down his spirits to the proper pitch of
respectful sympathy with her grief. His existence was golden with
new-found life and hope: into the shadow that covered hers he could not
enter. He could only endeavor to draw her out into the sunshine once
more.

One day the two were sitting, as usual, in silence or speaking but
rarely. It was a day in the very core of summer, and the life of Nature
was at its flood. The shadows of the trees rested so heavy and