leasure that the tears rushed to her eyes, and she stopped punching
Hero's back.

"'The rain is over and gone,'" she recited softly to herself, "'the
vines with the tender grape give a good smell, and the time of the
singing of birds has come.' There is no poetry like that old Hebrew
love-song. If only it had not been hackneyed by being turned into a
theological allegory! Ha, doggy, doggy! There comes a friend of ours!"
suddenly laughing and hugging him as she caught sight of a large man
coming up the road with a swinging gait and loose white overcoat. She
broke off a rose and put it in her breast, tied on her hat and hurried
down to meet him, the Song of Solomon still keeping time with her
thoughts in a lofty cadence: "'Who is this that cometh up from the
wilderness leaning upon his beloved? Set me as a seal upon thine
heart, as a seal upon thine arm. For love is strong as death.'"

"What's that, Maria? I heard you intoning as I came up the hill?" Her
eyes were soft and luminous and her voice unsteady. I am afraid Doctor
McCall's eyes were warmer in their admiration than they should
have been under the circumstances. Why should she not tell him? She
repeated it. She had been chattering for two hours on cervical, dorsal
and lumbar vertebrae, without stopping to take breath. But she grew
red now and broke down miserably.

"'Love is strong as death,' eh?" said McCall, awkwardly holding the
gate open for her. "Friendship ought to be tough enough to bear a
pretty stout strain, then. Such friendship as ours, I mean. For I
think a man and woman can be friends without--without--Well, what do
you think, Maria?" feeling a sudden imbecility in all his big body.

The little woman beside him looked up scared and ready to cry: "I
don't know, John, I'm sure. Do be quiet, Hero!" Then like a flash she
saw that he meant to ask her to marry him: he meant to place love upon
the higher basis of friendship. Maria was used to people who found new
names for old things. Why! why! what folly was this, as she grew cold
and hot by turns? So often she had pictured his coming to claim her,
and how she would go out as one calm controlling soul should to meet
another, to be dual yet united through all eternity; and here she was
shivering and tongue-tied, like any silly school-girl! Love-making and
marriage were at a discount with the Advanced Club of which she was a
member, and classed with dancing, fashionable dressing and other such
paltry femi