, with
the front of the brim turned down over his right eye. At each step he
settled down with a little jerk alternately on this hip and that, at the
same time faintly dropping the corresponding shoulder. They passed. John
and Mary looked at each other with a nod of mirthful approval. Why?
Because the strangers walked silently hand-in-hand.

It was a magical night. Even the part of town where they were, so devoid
of character by day, had become all at once romantic with phantasmal
lights and glooms, echoes and silences. Along the edge of a wide
chimney-top on one blank, new hulk of a house, that nothing else could
have made poetical, a mocking-bird hopped and ran back and forth,
singing as if he must sing or die. The mere names of the streets they
traversed suddenly became sweet food for the fancy. Down at the first
corner below they turned into one that had been an old country road,
and was still named Felicity.

Richling called attention to the word painted on a board. He merely
pointed to it in playful silence, and then let his hand sink and rest
on hers as it lay in his elbow. They were walking under the low boughs
of a line of fig-trees that overhung a high garden wall. Then some gay
thought took him; but when his downward glance met the eyes uplifted to
meet his they were grave, and there came an instantaneous tenderness
into the exchange of looks that would have been worse than uninteresting
to you or me. But the next moment she brightened up, pressed herself
close to him, and caught step. They had not owned each other long enough
to have settled into sedate possession, though they sometimes thought
they had done so. There was still a tingling ecstasy in one another's
touch and glance that prevented them from quite behaving themselves when
under the moon.

For instance, now, they began, though in cautious undertone, to sing.
Some person approached them, and they hushed. When the stranger had
passed, Mary began again another song, alone:--

"Oh, don't you remember sweet Alice, Ben Bolt?"

"Hush!" said John, softly.

She looked up with an air of mirthful inquiry, and he added:--

"That was the name of Dr. Sevier's wife."

"But he doesn't hear me singing."

"No; but it seems as if he did."

And they sang no more.

They entered a broad, open avenue, with a treeless, grassy way in the
middle, up which came a very large and lumbering street-car, with
smokers' benches on the roof, and drawn by tandem h