train, Lily and Gerald went strolling about the garden hand in hand.

Lily had been a bridesmaid, Gerald an usher. Both were in the fine
apparel of their parts; thoughts of weddings hummed in both of their
heads.

"Well, Lily," said the young man idly, in their walk between odorous
lines of wall-flowers and heliotrope, "I suppose you too will soon be
getting married."

"Oh, no!" Lily shook her head. "There is nobody I could marry."

"Why, I thought, Lily," he said, "that you were going to marry me!"

"No, Gerald," she replied promptly, but with gentleness and regret, so
as not to hurt his feelings.

"I might come and live with you," she added, after a second, "and keep
house for you. A cottage in the country, with beehives and ducks and a
little donkey.... Gerald, do you know about Sir William Wallace?"

Though a chasm appeared to divide this subject from the last, Gerald
shrewdly supposed a connection between them.

"Very little. You tell me."

"You haven't read 'The Scottish Chiefs'? I took it without permission
and kept it out of Fraeulein's sight. It grows light early now, you know,
and I read it for hours before getting up. Then whenever I could, I read
it in the daytime. And after they had left me at night, I read it with
the pink candles of my birthday cake. I cried so much that when I
finished I was ill with a fever and had to be kept in bed for three
days."

"Why, when was this?"

"Two weeks ago."

"My poor little Lily, how came I not to be told of it? And you sent me
such a beautiful remembrance when I was ill!--Well, Lily, I know now why
you won't take me. I'm not much like Sir William Wallace, that's a fact.
I might grow like him in courage and prowess, perhaps, to please you,
but I know that I should never be beautiful in kilts. It shall be as you
say, dear. We'll be brother and sister instead. And now tell me more
about this book, these Scottish.... Lily, do you see Mrs. Hawthorne on
the doorstep? Do you gather that the signs she is making are meant for
us? We came up together and I think she may wish to say she is ready to
go, and will give me a lift back to town...."

* * * * *

"We came up together!" With great frequency in these days Gerald was
going somewhere with Mrs. Hawthorne, not alone with her, but making one
of four in an amiable party. Sometimes it was his fate to make
conversation by the hour with Estelle, while Doctor Tom monopoliz