ed wonderingly at her
admirer, as if she were sort of bewildered by his looking so much that
way.

The stranger did not smile, but a light came over his face when he
caught that childlike glance. Then both these innocent creatures fell to
eating. Then he happened to look up again. So did she--a romantic
coincidence that sort of affinitized them to a great extent, before
anybody saw what was going on.

After breakfast the stranger hunted up some one who knew him and the
widow also. An introduction brought the two halves of that pair of
scissors together, and the blades fitted beautifully. All they wanted
was the rivet. But wait.

At twelve o'clock that day the stranger ventured to ask a favor. Would
the widow give him a little music?

The widow said she would. The sweetness of a whole boiling of maple
sugar was in her smile as she sat down by the parlor piano, and sent her
two little hands fluttering over it like a pair of white pigeons with
love-letters under their wings.

The widow flew her fingers; the widow looked at the stranger from under
her eyelashes, and her voice thrilled through him till he began to think
of magnolias and mocking-birds and other ornamental things which soften
a man's feelings down to the fluffiness of a feather bed.

When she had done singing, he asked her to walk with him on the beach.
She gave another slow lift of her eyelashes, said she would, and ran
upstairs after the Leghorn and the Japanese umbrella, brown and yellow,
with as many bones in it as the first April shad.

They walked the beach up and down, she leaning heavier and heavier on
his arm at each turn. Then they sat down on the sand with their faces to
the sea, and held the umbrella so as to shade off the people on the
bank--they didn't care for the sun a bit--and in that condition they sat
and talked and talked and talked.

By and by he got up from the sand. She lifted her eyes with a pitiful
look of helplessness. He reached out his hand, and she rose to it
gracefully, like a trout to a fly. The hand clung to his more than a
minute after she got up--the sand was so uneven, you see. The stranger
bore this with Christian fortitude, and really seemed as if he rather
liked it. In fact, he encouraged her to hold on; and she did, with her
sweet widowed face lifted to his just long enough to set his heart off
like a windmill, when she dropped it again.

When they came up the flight of wooden steps that leads down from the
ba