ittle vanities or
affectations, but was always a dear, good little child, as happy as the
day was long, and quite without a fear or apprehension. I had seen
very little of her in those three summers, for I had been away at the
sea-side, trying to fan the flickering life that alone was left to me
with pungent salt breezes and stinging baptisms of spray, but I had
liked that little pretty well. I did not think her so silly as Laura
did: she seemed to me so purely simple, that I sometimes wondered if her
honest directness and want of guile were folly or not. But I liked to
see her, as she cantered past my door on her pony, the gold tendrils
thick clustered about her throat and under the brim of her black hat,
and her bright blue eyes sparkling with the keen air, and a real
wild-rose bloom on her smiling face. She was a prettier sight even than
my profuse chrysanthemums, whose masses of garnet and yellow and white
nodded languidly to the autumn winds to-day.

I recalled myself from this dream of recollection, better satisfied with
Miss Bowen than I had been before. I could see just how her beauty had
bewitched Frank,--so bright, so tiny, so loving: one always wants to
gather a little, gay, odor-breathing rose-bud for one's own, and such
she was to him.

So then I opened his letter. It was dry and stiff: men's letters almost
always are; they cannot say what they feel; they will be fluent of
statistics, or description, or philosophy, or politics, but as to
feeling,--there they are dumb, except in real love-letters, and, of
course, Frank's was unsatisfactory accordingly. Once, toward the end,
came out a natural sentence: "Oh, Sue! if you knew her, you wouldn't
wonder!" So he had, after all, felt the apology he would not speak; he
had some little deference left for his deserted theories.

Well I knew what touched his pride, and struck that little revealing
spark from his deliberate pen: Josephine Bowen was rich, and he only a
poor lawyer in a country-town: he felt it even in this first flush of
love, and to that feeling I must answer when I wrote him,--not merely to
the announcement, and the delight, and the man's pride. So I answered
his letter at once, and he answered mine in person. I had nothing to say
to him, when I saw him; it was enough to see how perfectly happy and
contented he was,--how the proud, restless eyes, that had always looked
a challenge to all the world, were now tranquil to their depths. Nothing
had inte