for Miss Eldridge also, but he compounded with conscience: he
would ask to see her after he had seen Rosamond.

"Why, how very nice you look! You are really handsome!" And the
dignified professor was turned about, as if he had been a graven image,
by two soft little hands, which he caught in his own, and--so forth.

She was very sure now that she loved him, as in a certain sense she did.
But she would not consent to an immediate marriage, nor to the building
of a miniature palace for her reception. She owed it to Miss Eldridge,
she said, to fulfil her engagement and not to go away just as she was
beginning to be really useful. And as for a house, would it not be
pleasanter to live in lodgings and be free to come and go as they would?
So his wishes, as usual, were deferred to hers. The long fall evenings
began, and he brought, at her request, carefully-selected "improving"
books, to be interrupted, as he read, by earnest questions, such as,--

"_Would_ you embroider this linen dress with its own color or a
contrasting one, if you were me?"

Spring came again, and the professor, looking ten years younger than he
had looked a year ago, brought to his "rose of all the world" a bunch of
the first May roses.

"Oh, the lovely, lovely things!" she exclaimed delightedly. "You shall
have two kisses for them, Paul. Where _did_ they come from, so early in
May?"

"From the south side of the wall of an old garden which I used to weed
when I was a boy."

"Will you take me there? Is it near here?" she asked eagerly.

"I will take you there," he answered, "some day; but it is not near
here: it is more than a hundred miles away."

"And you sent all that way for them just for me? How good, how kind you
are! There, I will take two of the half-blown ones for my hat, and two
for my neck, and one for your button-hole--oh, yes, you shall! Hold
still till I pin it. Now just see how nice you look! And the rest I will
put in this glass, and then Miss Christina can enjoy them too; she's so
kind, and I can't do anything for her. Oh, that makes me think! I have
to go across the river this afternoon to hunt up a dress-maker she told
me about, a delightfully cheap and good one, and she said you would know
if there were any way of crossing anywhere near ---- Street, the bridge
is so far from where I want to go. Is there?"

"Yes," he replied, "there's a rather uncertain way: an old fellow who
owns a boat lives close by there, and if he's at