so easy to let rosy lips persuade us into
doing what we are dying to do. He stayed, and his fate was fixed--for
good or for evil--fixed. That very night his portmanteau came from
Portland, and the "spare room" was his.

Supper over, Uncles Reuben and Joe lit their pipes, and went away to
their fields and their cattle--Aunt Hester "cleared up," and Miss
Bourdon took possession of Mr. Gilbert. She wasn't the least in awe of
him, she was only a bright, frank, fearless, grown-up child. He was
grave, staid, old--is not thirty-five a fossil age in the eyes of
seventeen?--but venerable though he was, she was not the least afraid of
him.

She led her captive--oh, too willing, forth in triumph to see her
treasures--sleek, well-fed cows, skittish ponies, big horses, hissing
geese, gobling turkeys, hens and chicks innumerable. He took a pleased
interest in them all--calves and colts, chickens and ducklings, ganders
and gobblers, listened to the history of each, as though he had never
listened to such absorbing biographies in all his life before.

How rosy were the lips that spoke, how eager the sunny face uplifted to
his, and when was there a time that Wisdom did not fall down and worship
Beauty? He liked to think of her pure and sweet, absorbed in these
innocent things, to find neither coquetry nor sentimentalism in this
healthy young mind, to know her ignorant as the goslings themselves of
all the badness and hardness and cruelty of the big, cruel world.

They went into the garden, and lingered under the lilacs, until the last
pink flush of the July day died, and the stars came out, and the moon
sailed up serene. They found plenty to say; and, as a rule, Richard
Gilbert rarely found much to say to girls. But Miss Bourdon could talk,
and the lawyer listened to the silvery, silly prattle with a grave smile
on his face.

It was easy to answer all her eager questions, to tell her of life in
New York, of the opera and the theatres, and the men and women who wrote
the books and the poems she loved. And as she drank it in, her face
glowed and her great eyes shone.

"Oh, how beautiful it all must be!" she cried, "to hear such music, to
see such plays, to know such people! If one's life could only be like
the lives of the heroines of books--romantic, and beautiful, and full of
change. If one could only be rich and a lady, Mr. Gilbert!"

She clasped her hands with the hopelessness of that thought. He smiled
as he listened.

"A l