sy, sweet with a
curious tang and haunting in its alien and insistent note in the
rhapsody of odors.

"There's something new in bloom in your garden, Lady of the Rose?" he
asked questioningly.

"Yes, it's the roses on the hedges coming out; don't they smell briary
and--good? Just this last night you will be able to carry away with
you a whiff of real sweetbriar. To-morrow the whole town will be in
bloom. It is now I think if we could only see it." Rose Mary had
gained her composure and the poignant wistfulness in her voice was but
a part of the motif of the briar roses in the valley dusk.

"I'll see it all right to-morrow and often. Sweetbriar--it's going to
blind me so that I won't be able to make my way along Broadway.
Everything hereafter will be located up and down Providence Road for
me." Everett's voice held to a tone of quiet lightness and he bravely
puffed his rings of smoke out on the breezes.

"Perhaps some day you'll pass us again along the road to your
Providence," said Rose Mary gently, and the wistful question was all
that her woman's tradition allowed her to ask--though her heart break
with its pride.

"Some day," answered Everett, and underneath the quiet voice sounded a
savage note and his teeth bit through his cigar, which he threw out
into the dew-carpeted grass. Just then there came from up under the
eaves a soft disturbed flutter of wings and a gentle dove note was
answered reassuringly and tenderly in kind.

"Rose Mary," he said as he turned to her and laid his hand on the step
near her, "once you materialized your heart for me, and now I'm going
to do the same for mine to you. Yours, you say, is an old gabled,
vine-clad, dove-nested country house, a shelter for the people you
love--and always kept for your Master's use. It is something just to
have had a man's road to Providence lead past the garden gate. I make
acknowledgement. And mine? I think it is like one of those squat,
heathen, Satsuma vases, inlaid with distorted figures and symbols and
toned in all luridness of color, into which has been tossed a poor
sort of flower plucked from any bush the owner happened to pass, which
has been salted down in frivolity--or perhaps something stronger.
I'll keep the lid on to-night, for _you_ wouldn't like the--perfume."

"If you'd let me have it an hour I would take it down to the
milk-house and empty and scrub it and then I could use it to pour
sweet cream into. Couldn't you--you leave it here