tone.

"Did you think I was?"

"No--you are too much of a woman for that, even if you had believed it
true."

"Then _you_ were not frightened?--" she said with some comicality.

"I? desperately!--my note did not give you any idea of the state of my
mind! Imagine me sitting down stairs and saying to myself--(words
naturally suggested by the state of the weather)--

'O how this spring of love resembleth
Th' uncertain glories of an April day,
Which now shews all the beauties of the sun,
And by and by a cloud takes all away!'"

One of the soft flashes of Faith's eye came first to answer him; and
then she remarked very coolly, (N.B. her face was not so,) "I think it
will clear at noon, Endecott."

"Do you?" he said looking towards the window with a counterfeit
surprise that was in comical antithesis to his last words,--"does it
rain still!"

Faith's eye came back quick from the window to him, and then, for the
first time in many a long day, her old mellow sweet laugh rolled over
the subject, dismissing make-believes and figures of speech in its
clear matter-of-fact rejoicing.

"My dear little Mignonette!" Mr. Linden said, "that does my very heart
good. You are really getting better, in spite of lessons and warnings,
and all other hindrances. Do you want to know what I have truly been
thinking of since you came up stairs? Shall we exchange thoughts?"

"Please give me yours," she answered.

"They sprang from Miss Essie's question. Faith, when she asked me what
my wife would have, I could not tell her--I could not answer it to
myself afterwards very definitely. Only so far--she will have all I
have to give." His hand was smoothing and arranging her hair as he
spoke--his look one that nobody but Faith ever had from Mr. Linden. She
had looked up once and seen it; and then she stood before him, so still
and silent as if she might have had nothing to say; but every line of
her brow, her moved lip, her attitude, the very power of her silence,
contradicted that, and testified as well to the grace of a grave and
most exquisite humility which clothed her from head to foot. Mr. Linden
was as silent as she, watching her; but then he drew her off to the low
couch in the wide old-fashioned entry window, and seated her there in a
very bath of spring air and struggling sunbeams.

"I suppose it is useless to say 'Please give me yours'," he said
smiling. "Mignonette, we have had no reading to-day--do you like this