here?"

"To the Gallego mansion, at Fifth and Main Streets. Mr. Allan has bought
it. The dear little mother, who, I'd say, if you'd let me, is so much
better to me than I deserve, is full of plans for furnishing it and is
going to fit up a beautiful room in it for me. It will be a delightful
home for us, and quite grand after our modest cottage, but do you know
I'm goose enough to be homesick at the thought of giving up my little
den under the roof? Myself and I have had such jolly times together in
it!"

She had scarcely heard him, except the first words and the stunning
facts they contained. There was a minute's silence, then she spoke in a
changed, quivering voice.

"Then that will be the end of our friendship, I suspect! When you get
out of the neighborhood, and are off most of the time at the University,
we will doubtless see little more of you."

Her clear blue eyes were shining up at him through tears. Her mouth was
tremulous as a distressed child's. The appeal met an instant response
from the tender-hearted poet. _Both_ the flower-like hands were captured
this time, and held fast, in spite of their fluttering. The excessively
sweet fragrance of the blossom in her hair was in his nostrils. Her
quick, short breaths told him of the tempest in her tender young bosom.

"Myra, little Myra, do you care like that?" he cried. "Then let the
friendship go, and be my dear little sweetheart, won't you? I'm dying of
loneliness and the want of somebody to love and to love me--somebody who
understands me--and you do, don't you, Myra, darling?"

She was too happy to answer, but she suffered him to put his arms around
her and kiss her soft pale hair--and her brow--and her tremulous
mouth--the first kisses of love to him as well as to her. And ah, how
sweet!

He laughed happily, lifted out of his gloom by this new, this
deliriously sweet dream.

"Do you know, little sweetheart," he said, in a voice that was bubbling
with joy, "I feel that you have cast those devils out of me forever. It
was you that I wanted all the time, and did not know it. Some of these
days, when I've been through college and settled down, we will be
married, and wherever our home is, we must always have a porch like
this, with a rose on it, and" (kissing her brow) "you must always wear a
jessamine in your hair."

And so the boy-poet and his girl play-mate, very much to their own
surprise, parted affianced lovers, and a long vista of sunlit days
se