d to pierce through her;
and she blushed pink while her eyes burned under her trembling lashes.
Then the paper bag, containing the tomatoes, burst in her hands, and its
contents rolled, one by one, over the littered floor to his feet. Both
stooped at once to recover it, and while their hands touched amid wilted
cabbage leaves, the girl felt that love had taken gilded wings and
departed forever!

"Put them in the basket, dear," Mrs. Pendleton could be heard saying
calmly in the midst of her daughter's agony--for, having lived through
the brief illumination of romance, she had come at last into that steady
glow which encompasses the commonplace.

"This is my cousin Oliver, Virginia," remarked Susan as casually as if
the meeting of the two had not been planned from all eternity by the
beneficent Powers.

"I'm afraid I've spoiled your nice red tomatoes," said a voice that
filled Virginia's whirling mind with a kind of ecstatic dizziness. As
the owner of the voice held out his hand, she saw that it was long and
thin like the rest of him, with blue veins crossing the back, and
slender, slightly crooked fingers that hurt hers with the strength of
their pressure. "To confess the truth," he added gaily after an instant,
"my breath was quite taken away because, somehow, this was the last
place on earth in which I expected to find you. It's a dreadful
spot--don't you think so? If we've got to be cannibals, why in Heaven's
name make a show and a parade of it?"

"What an extraordinary young man!" said Mrs. Pendleton's eyes; and
Virginia found herself blushing again because she felt that her mother
had not understood him. A delicious embarrassment--something different
and more vivid than any sensation she had ever known--held her
speechless while he looked at her. Had her life depended on it, she
could not have uttered a sentence--could hardly even have lifted her
lashes, which seemed suddenly to have become so heavy that she felt the
burden of them weighing over her eyes. All the picturesque phrases she
had planned to speak at their first meeting had taken wings with
perfidious romance, yet she would have given her dearest possession to
have been able to say something really clever. "He thinks me a
simpleton, of course," she thought--perfectly unconscious that Oliver
was not thinking of her wits at all, but of the wonderful rose-pink of
her flesh. At one and the same instant, she felt that this silence was
the most marvellous t