not yet married! Yes, and we shall close the book, and still
she will be Hope Wayne.

How could we help it? How could a faithful chronicler but tell his story
as it is? It is not at his will that heroes marry, and heroines are given
in marriage. He merely watches events and records results; but the
inevitable laws of human life are hidden in God's grace beyond his
knowledge.

There is Arthur Merlin painting pictures to this day, and every year with
greater beauty and wider recognition. He wears the same velvet coat of
many buttons--or its successor in the third or fourth remove--and still
he whistles and sings at his work, still draws back from the easel and
turns his head on one side to look at his picture, and cons it carefully
through the tube of his closed hand; still lays down the pallet and,
lighting a cigar, throws himself into the huge easy-chair, hanging one
leg over the chair-arm and gazing, as he swings his foot, at something
which does not seem to be in the room. Cheerful and gay, he has always a
word of welcome for the loiterer who returns to Italy by visiting the
painters; even if the loiterer find him with the foot idly swinging and
the cigar musingly smoking itself away.

Nor is the painter conscious of any gaping, unhealed wound that
periodically bleeds. There are nights in mid-summer when, leaning from
his window, he thinks of many things, and among others, of a picture he
once painted of the legend of Latmos. He smiles to think that, at the
time, he half persuaded himself that he might be Endymion, yet the
feeling with which he smiles is of pity and wonder rather than of regret.

At Thanksgiving dinners, at Christmas parties, at New Year and Twelfth
Night festivals, no guest so gay and useful, so inventive and delightful,
as Arthur Merlin the painter. Just as Aunt Winnifred has abandoned her
theory it has become true, and all the girls do seem to love the man who
respects them as much as the younger men do with whom they nightly dance
in winter. He romps with the children, has a perfectly regulated and
triumphant sliding-scale of gifts and attentions; and only this
Christmas, although he is now--well, Aunt Winnifred has locked up the
Family Bible and begins to talk of Arthur as a young man--yet only
this Christmas, at Lawrence Newt's family party, at which, so nimbly
did they run round, it was almost impossible to compute the actual
number of Newt, and Wynne, and Bennet children--Arthur Merlin brou