there is
warmer, richer blood coursing in my veins than the placid stream that
crept through theirs."

"There will never be any such people to me as they were," said her
lover, "for they took you and brought you up for me."

"Sometimes," she went on dreamily, "I feel sure that I am of good
family, and the blood of my ancestors seems to call to me in clear and
certain tones. Then again when my mood changes, I am all at sea--I feel
that even if I had but simply to turn my hand to learn who I am and
whence I came, I should shrink from taking the step, for fear that what
I might learn would leave me forever unhappy."

"Dearest," he said, taking her in his arms, while from the hall and down
the corridor came the softened strains of music, "put aside these
unwholesome fancies. Your past is shrouded in mystery. Take my name, as
you have taken my love, and I 'll make your future so happy that you
won't have time to think of the past. What are a lot of musty, mouldy
old grandfathers, compared with life and love and happiness? It 's hardly
good form to mention one's ancestors nowadays, and what 's the use of
them at all if one can't boast of them?"

"It 's all very well of you to talk that way," she rejoined. "But suppose
you should marry me, and when you become famous and rich, and patients
flock to your office, and fashionable people to your home, and every one
wants to know who you are and whence you came, you 'll be obliged to
bring out the governor, and the judge, and the rest of them. If you
should refrain, in order to forestall embarrassing inquiries about _my_
ancestry, I should have deprived you of something you are entitled to,
something which has a real social value. And when people found out all
about you, as they eventually would from some source, they would want to
know--we Americans are a curious people--who your wife was, and you
could only say"----

"The best and sweetest woman on earth, whom I love unspeakably."

"You know that is not what I mean. You could only say--a Miss Nobody,
from Nowhere."

"A Miss Hohlfelder, from Cincinnati, the only child of worthy German
parents, who fled from their own country in '49 to escape political
persecution--an ancestry that one surely need not be ashamed of."

"No; but the consciousness that it was not true would be always with
me, poisoning my mind, and darkening my life and yours."

"Your views of life are entirely too tragic, Clara," the young man
argued soothi