ht
he had never seen there, and her hands extended in glad welcome.

"You, Lina! You here? You have relented? This is too much happiness!"

Catching both soft white hands in his, he bent his lips to them, full of
the rapture he could not speak. He forgot to wonder why she was there.
He forgot everything but the love in her eyes and the joyous ring of her
voice.

Ere they could be seated the door again opened and admitted an elderly
lady, who approached smiling.

"My dear aunt!" exclaimed the young lover. "You, too? This _is_ a
surprise! What does it all mean? How did you get here, and when?"

The ladies stood smiling at each other and gazing upon him with a
significance that indeed clamored for explanation.

"Weldon, is it possible you do not guess?" asked his aunt.

"What? Why, what do you mean? I am all bewildered!" he exclaimed,
looking from one to the other till a faint glimmer of the truth began
to appear through the mists.

"Stupid boy!" again emphasized the lady, "whom did you come here to
see?"

Quickly glancing at the beautiful, radiant, still-smiling face of the
young girl, and then at the impressive features of the elder lady,
Weldon Gardner, with bated breath and a dazed expression in his startled
eyes, exclaimed:

"You--are--Evelyn Howard--you?"

"Exactly so. Doctor Gardner--Evelina Dent Howard--at your service!"

As she spoke, she placed her hand in his, and asked, in the liquid tones
whose cadences he so well remembered, "Have you been punished enough for
your unknightly scorn of the girl you condemned without trial?"

"Oh, forgive!" he pleaded, drawing her to a seat beside him. "I see it
all now. What a dolt you must have thought me! How could you ever have
tolerated me?"

"There is the conspirator," archly said Evelyn, pointing to Mrs. Duke.
"She it was who enabled me to deceive you. I wrote to her immediately
upon leaving your house for my cousin's, in Brooklyn, and she at once
devised the scheme that I have found so hard to carry out. Meanwhile,
she never lost sight of you."

It was long before the necessary explanations were exhausted, and when
the new day dawned no happier man proudly entered upon his duties than
did Weldon Gardner.

* * * * *

It is upon a soft September afternoon that we last see Dr. Gardner and
his lovely wife. Within a snug little arbor beside the lake in Central
Park the two sit side by side, watching the idly-floating pleasu