ath, like a
flea in a rose-jar.

Fixed to the spot by this apparition, Miss Betty stood wildly staring,
her straining eyelids showing the white above and below the large brown
iris. Her breath came faster and deeper, until, between her parted lips
it became vocal in a quick sound like a sob. At that he spoke.

"Forgive me!" The voice was low, vibrant, and so exceedingly musical
that he might have been accused of coolly selecting his best tone; and
it became only sweeter when, even more softly, in a semi-whisper of
almost crucial pleading, he said, "Ah--don't go away!"

In truth, she could not go; she had been too vitally stirred; she began
to tremble excessively, and sank back upon the bench, motioning him away
with vague gestures of her shaking hands.

This was more than the Incroyable had counted upon, and far from his
desires. He started forward with an exclamation.

"Don't come near me!" she gasped. "Who are you? Go away!"

"Give me one second to explain," he began; but with the instant
reassurance of this beginning she cut him off short, her fears dispelled
by his commonplace. Nay, indignation displaced them so quickly that she
fairly flashed up before him to her full height.

"You did not come in by the gate!" she cried. "What do you mean by
coming here in that dress What right have you in my garden?"

"Just one word," he begged quickly, but very gently. "You'd allow a
street-beggar that much!"

She stood before him, panting, and, as he thought, glorious, in her
flush of youth and anger. Tom Vanrevel had painted her incoherently,
but richly, in spite of that, his whole heart being in the portrait;
and--Crailey Gray had smiled at what he deemed the exaggeration of an
ordinarily unimpressionable man who had fallen in love "at first sight;"
yet, in the presence of the reality, the Incroyable decided that Tom's
colors had been gray and humble. It was not that she was merely lovely,
that her nose was straight, and her chin dexterously wrought between
square and oval; that her dark hair lay soft as a shadow on her white
brow; not that the trembling hand she held against her breast sprang
from a taper wrist and tapered again to the tips of the long fingers;
nor that she was of that slenderness as strong as it is delicate; not
all the exquisite regularity of line and mould, nor simplicity of color,
gave her that significance which made the Incroyable declare to himself
that he stood for the first time in the pre