e back, and stirred him up to
try again.

Although Amalia's convent training had greatly restricted her
knowledge of literature other than religious, her later years of
intimate companionship with her father, and her mother's truly
remarkable knowledge of the classics and fearless investigation of the
modern thought of her day, had enlarged Amalia's horizon; while her
own vivid imagination and her native geniality caused her to lighten
always her mother's more somber thought with a delicate and gracious
play of fancy that was at once fascinating and delightful. This, and
Harry's determination to live to the utmost in these weeks of respite,
made him at times almost gay.

Most of all he reveled in Amalia's music. Certain melodies that she
said her father had made he loved especially, and sometimes she would
accompany them with a plaintive chant, half singing and half
recitation, of the sonnet which had inspired them, and which had been
woven through them. It was at these times that Larry listened with his
elbows on his knees and his eyes fixed on the fire, and Harry with his
eyes on Amalia's face, while the cabin became to him glorified with a
light, no longer from the flames, but with a radiance like that which
surrounded Dante's Beatrice in Paradise.

Amalia loved to please Larry Kildene. For this reason, knowing the joy
he would take in it, and also because she loved color and light and
joy, and the giving of joy, she took the gorgeous silk he had brought
her, and made it up in a fashion of her own. Down in the cities, she
knew, women were wearing their gowns spread out over wide hoops, but
she made the dress as she knew they were worn at the time Larry had
lived among women and had seen them most.

The bodice she fitted closely and shaped into a long point in front,
and the skirt she gathered and allowed to fall in long folds to her
feet. The sleeves she fitted only to her elbows, and gathered in them
deep lace of her own making--lace to dream about, and the creation of
which was one of those choice things she had learned of the good
sisters at the convent. About her neck she put a bertha, kerchiefwise,
and pinned it with a brooch of curiously wrought gold. Larry, "the
discreet and circumspect liar," thought of the emerald brooch she had
brought him to sell for her, and knowing how it would glow and blend
among the changing tints of the silk, he fetched it to her, explaining
that he could not sell it, and that t