t for fun. I meant to tell you. I--"

"Oh, that's all right," said Langbourne. "I had no business to expect
yours, or to send you mine." But he believed that he had; that his
faithful infatuation had somehow earned him the right to do what he had
done, and to hope for what he had not got; without formulating the fact,
he divined that she believed it too. Between the man-soul and the
woman-soul it can never go so far as it had gone in their case without
giving them claims upon each other which neither can justly deny.

She did not attempt to deny it. "I oughtn't to have done it, and I ought
to have told you at once--the next letter--but I--you said you were
coming, and I thought if you did come--I didn't really expect you to;
and it was all a joke,--off-hand."

It was very lame, but it was true, and it was piteous; yet Langbourne
could not relent. His grievance was not with what she had done, but what
she was; not what she really was, but what she materially was; her
looks, her figure, her stature, her whole presence, so different from
that which he had been carrying in his mind, and adoring for a year
past.

If it was ridiculous, and if with her sense of the ridiculous she felt
it so, she was unable to take it lightly, or to make him take it
lightly. At some faint gleams which passed over her face he felt himself
invited to regard it less seriously; but he did not try, even
provisionally, and they fell into a silence that neither seemed to have
the power of breaking.

It must be broken, however; something must be done; they could not sit
there dumb forever. He looked at the sheet of music on the piano and
said, "I see you have been trying that song. Do you like it?"

"Yes, very much," and now for the first time she got her voice fairly
above a whisper. She took the sheet down from the music-rest and looked
at the picture of the lithographed title. It was of a tiled roof lifted
among cypresses and laurels with pigeons strutting on it and sailing
over it.

"It was that picture," said Langbourne, since he must say something,
"that I believe I got the song for; it made me think of the roof of an
old Spanish house I saw in Southern California."

"It must be nice, out there," said Miss Simpson, absently staring at the
picture. She gathered herself together to add, pointlessly, "Juliet says
she's going to Europe. Have you ever been?"

"Not to Europe, no. I always feel as if I wanted to see my own country
first. Is s