r plans were.

"To teach and to live," she said. Her enthusiasm for the work seemed
entirely gone.

Once he said, "This is the finest hour of my life."

On the bank of the river they paused and seated themselves on the sward
under a tree whose roots fingered the stream with knuckled hands.

"Yes, every time you look up at me you bring back my boyish idol," he
went on. "She was older than I. It is as if I had grown older and she
had not, and that she were you, or you were she. I can't tell you how it
has affected me. Every movement you make goes deep down into my
sweetest, tenderest recollections. It's always June there, always sweet
and sunny. Her death and burial were mystical in their beauty. I looked
in her coffin. She was the grandest statue that ever lay in marble; the
Greek types are insipid beside that vision. You'll say I idealized her;
possibly I did, but there she is. O God! it was terrible to see one die
so young and so lovely."

There was a silence. Tears came to her eyes. He could only exclaim;
weeping was denied him. His voice trembled, but grew firmer as he went
on:

"And now you come. I don't know exactly in what way you resemble her. I
only know you shake me as no other human being has done since that
coffin-lid shut out her face." He lifted his head and looked around.
"But Nature is beautiful and full of light and buoyancy. I am not going
to make you sad. I want to make you happy. I was only a boy to her. She
cared for me only as a mature woman likes an apt pupil, but she made all
Nature radiant for me, as you do now."

He smiled upon her suddenly. His somber mood passed like one of the
shadows of the clouds floating over the campus. It was only a
recollected mood. As he looked at her the old hunger came into his
heart, but the buoyancy and emotional exaltation of youth came back
also.

"Miss Powell, are you free to marry me?" he said suddenly.

She grew very still, but she flushed and then she turned her face away
from him. She had no immediate reply.

"That is an extraordinary thing to ask you, I know," he went on; "but it
seems as if I had known you a long time, and then sitting here in the
midst of Nature with the insects singing all about us--well, conventions
are not so vital as in drawing rooms. Remember your Browning."

She who had declaimed Browning so blithely now sat silent, but the color
went out of her face, and she listened to the multitudinous stir and
chirp of living thing