inting a picture you may as well go in for the whole
thing and make it sumptuous), and her eyes were gray. They were very
earnest, and yet they sparkled and laughed to him companionably; and
sometimes he had smiled back upon her. The Undine danced before him
through the lonely years, on fair nights in his walks, and came to sit
by his fire on winter evenings when he stared alone at the embers.

And to-night, here in Plattville, he heard a voice he had waited for
long, one that his fickle memory told him he had never heard before.
But, listening, he knew better--he had heard it long ago, though when
and how, he did not know, as rich and true, and ineffably tender as now.
He threw a sop to his common sense. "Miss Sherwood is a little thing"
(the image was so surely tall) "with a bumpy forehead and spectacles,"
he said to himself, "or else a provincial young lady with big eyes
to pose at you." Then he felt the ridiculousness of looking after his
common sense on a moonlight night in June; also, he knew that he lied.

The song had ceased, but the musician lingered, and the keys were
touched to plaintive harmonies new to him. He had come to Plattville
before "Cavalleria Rusticana" was sung at Rome, and now, entranced, he
heard the "Intermezzo" for the first time. Listening to this, he feared
to move lest he should wake from a summer-night's dream.

A ragged little shadow flitted down the path behind him, and from a
solitary apple-tree, standing like a lonely ghost in the middle of
the field, came the _woo_ of a screech owl--twice. It was
answered--twice--from a clump of elder-bushes that grew in a
fence-corner fifty yards west of the pasture bars. Then the barrel of a
squirrel rifle issued, lifted out of the white elder-blossoms, and
lay along the fence. The music in the house across the way ceased, and
Harkless saw two white dresses come out through the long parlor windows
to the veranda.

"It will be cooler out here," came the voice of the singer clearly
through the quiet. "What a night!"

John vaulted the bars and started to cross the road. They saw him from
the veranda, and Miss Briscoe called to him in welcome. As his tall
figure stood out plainly in the bright light against the white dust,
a streak of fire leaped from the elder-blossoms and there rang out the
sharp report of a rifle. There were two screams from the veranda. One
white figure ran into the house. The other, a little one with a gauzy
wrap streaming beh