s since,--promise me
now, that, if Hazel and Vane do not marry till Doomsday, you will not
ask Marlboro' for the gift. It places you, an unprotected girl, too much
under the weather with such a man as Marlboro'. You promise me?"

And he rose opposite her, smiling and gazing.

"A whole promise is rash," said Eloise, laughing. "Half a one I give
you."

"It is for yourself," said Mr. St. George, grimly; and he turned
abruptly away, because he knew he lied, and was afraid lest she would
know it too.

It was two or three weeks after this, that Mr. St. George, returning one
chilly night from some journey, found Mrs. Arles asleep in her chair, a
fire upon the hearth, and Eloise sitting on the floor before it with her
box and brushes, essaying to catch the shifting play of color opposite
her, and paint there one of the great cloven tongues of fire that went
soaring up the chimney.

"In pursuit of an _ignis-fatuus_?" asked he, stooping over her an
instant, and suddenly snatching himself erect, as she looked up with a
certain sweetness in her smile, and pushed back the drooping tress,
that, streaming along the temple and lying in one large curve upon the
cheek, sometimes fell too low for order, though never for grace.

"And all in vain," she said, laughingly. "I've worked an hour, I can get
the violet edges, I can get the changing bend,--but there 'a no lustre,
no flicker,--I can't find out the secret of painting flame."

"It is a secret you found out long ago!" muttered Mr. St. George,
unintelligibly, and strode out, banging the door behind him.

And Eloise, astonished and dismayed, abruptly put up her pencils, and
went to bed.

So that, when Mr. St. George returned a half-hour afterward for a
cheerful fireside-season over nuts and wine, there was nobody there but
Mrs. Arles, who picked herself up out of her nap, and went placidly on
with her tatting and contrivances.

Two stragglers on the ice-fields of the polar seas would have met each
other with less frozen chill than St. George and Eloise did on the
succeeding morning. And in that chill a long period elapsed, during
which Mr. St. George attended to his affairs, and Eloise silently cast
up her accounts.

* * * * *

One morning in the spring, after the last of the soft and balmy winter,
Mr. St. George said to Mrs. Arles, at breakfast,--

"A dozen rooms, or more, can be ready by Wednesday? There will be guests
at noon, for severa