u are? You're mine."

Floods of color went over her face, and she looked down. Then, as he was
silent, she had to speak.

"Newell," she said, "I only meant--I thought maybe I might help you--"
There she had to look at him, and found his eyes upon her in a grave
sweetness she could hardly understand. No such flower had bloomed for
her in her whole life.

"Why, Dorcas," he said, "think how we've worked together! What do you
s'pose we worked so for?"

Alida's name rose to her lips, but her tongue refused to speak. At that
moment it seemed too slight a word to say.

"'Twas so we could find out where we stood," the grave voice went on.
"That was it."

She felt breathless, as if they had together been pursuing some slight
thing, a butterfly, a bubble, and now, when it was under their hands,
they saw that the thing itself was not what mattered. It was the race.
They had kept step, and still together now, they had run into a safe
and happy place.

There was the beat of hoofs upon the road.

"Stay here," she breathed. "I can't go with him. I'll tell him so."

She ran out and down the path, a swift Atalanta, her white skirts
floating. Clayton Rand was at the gate. Even in the instant of his
smiling at her she realized that the smile was that of one who is
expectant of a pleasure, but only of the pleasure itself, he does not
care with whom. Her eyes glowed upon him, her brown cheeks were red with
dancing blood.

"I can't go," she said, in a full, ecstatic voice. "Thank you ever so
much. I can't ever go again. See!" she pointed down the road. "Don't she
look pretty in among the trees? That's 'Lida. She's got on her blue."

She turned and hastened up the path again. At the door she paused to
look once again at the spot of blue through the vista of summer green.
It was moving. It was mounting into Clayton Rand's wagon. Then Dorcas
went in where Newell was waiting to kiss her.

"He's drove along," she said, from her trance of happiness. "'Lida's
gone to ride with him."

Already the name meant no more to them then the bubble they had chased.

"Come, Dorcas, come," said her lover, in that new voice. "Come here to
me."

FLOWERS OF PARADISE

Hetty Niles, with a sudden distaste for her lonely kitchen, its bare
cleanliness the more revealed by the February sun, caught her shawl from
the nail and threw it over her head. She spoke aloud, in a way she had
taken up within the last week, while her solitude was still