y
happy days to man, whose heart is wicked from his birth, as her mother
had been wont to tell her.

Hearing her hum very softly to herself, he asked what she sang. She
said, her mother's favorite hymn, and gave it aloud, with the words:

Father, what e'er of earthly bliss
Thy sovereign will denies,
Accepted at Thy throne of grace
Let this petition rise:

Give me a calm, a thankful heart,
From every murmur free;
The blessings of Thy grace impart
And make me live to Thee.

Like one with an impeccable ear, but with small esteem for his gifts as
a singer, Gerald murmured the melody after her, just audibly, to show he
cared to have his share in her memories.

But mainly the two of them thought of each other.

Gerald, regarding Aurora's hands as they lay in her
lap--innocent-looking, loyal-looking, rather large hands, which during
his illness he had liked to think were Madonna hands, but when seen in
health they were not, really--was amazed to remember the day when their
making passes over his face had filled him with perverse repugnance.

And Aurora, remembering the first time she had seen Gerald and nicknamed
him Stickly-prickly, while feeling him more than three thousand miles
removed from her, was amazed....

So they sat, two little dots, two trembling threads, against the screen
of the universe and eternity, and their two selves, under the spell of a
world-old enchantment, loomed so large to each that the universal and
the eternal were to them two little dots, two threads.

* * * * *

Gerald saw how the afternoon was mellowing toward sunset.... And the
important things of the day had not been touched upon.

Our hero had traversed great spaces in the region of sentiment during
the two days allowed the Hermitage to stand or crumble without him. The
first of them had been spent far from it, even as Aurora supposed, for
the sake of letting the impression of having been laughed at wear off a
little. Already for some time before that forced climax Gerald had been
haunted by the feeling that he ought to offer himself to Aurora, as it
were to regularize his status in her house. After hanging around as he
had been doing, one might almost say that good manners demanded it. Her
fashion, on that evening in the garden, of treating the idea that he
could be enamoured of her assured him that she would refuse. He would
have done his duty, and the