tationary, I have less trouble even than he has."

"You certainly are nomadic in that you are wandering from the point,
Renshaw, which is very crafty of you, but useless. As I am continually
telling you--we feel bound to see that you get well and strong while you
are with us, and how can you do either when day after day you are
over-exerting yourself?"

There was just a _soupcon_ of tenderness in her voice--and Marian
Selwood had a beautiful voice--as she thus reasoned with him. Her head
was partly bent down over her work, throwing into prominence the
glorious masses of her golden hair, which, swept up into an artistic
coronal, lent an additional dignity to her calm, sweet beauty. Renshaw
lounged back in his cane chair, idly watching the supple, shapely
fingers plying the needle in rhythmic regularity--every movement one of
unconscious grace. The boom of bees floated upon the jessamine-laden
air, varied by the shriller buzz of a long, rakish-looking hornet
winging in and out of his absurd little clay nest, wedged, like that of
a swallow, beneath the eaves of the verandah. Great butterflies flitted
among the sunflowers, but warily and in terror of the lurking amantis--
that arrant hypocrite, so devotional in his attitude, so treacherously
voracious in his method of seizing and assimilating his prey--and a pair
of tiny sugar-birds, in their delicate crimson and green vests, flashed
fearlessly to and fro within a couple of yards of Renshaw's head,
dipping their long needle-like bills into the waxen blossoms of the
fragrant jessamine.

And here we frankly admit losing patience with our friend Renshaw. Had
we been in his place, with that exquisitely modulated voice talking to
us, and fraught with that tender solicitude for our well-being, we feel
sure we should in our own mind have sent a certain outrageous little
flirt to the right-about then and there, and have dismissed her from our
thoughts outright. But then, after all, we must remember that these two
had known each other intimately all their lives, had been almost like
brother and sister, which, we suppose, counts for something.

"Well, I'm taking it easy enough this morning, in your sweet society,
Marian," he rejoined, "so you mustn't be too rough upon me. And--it is
Paradise."

"What is? My society?"

He laughed.

"That, of course. Understood. Didn't need specifying. But--all this,"
with a wave of the arm that caused the sugar-birds to dart away i