nnese waltz, the air of which might have been taken from almost
any popular Yankee hymn-book.

He folded Portlaw's letter and pocketed it; and lay for a while under
the open window, enjoying his own noiseless mirth, gaily accompanied by
Dolly Winning's fresh, clear singing or her capricious improvising.

Begonias bloomed in a riotous row on the sill, nodding gently in the
river-wind which also fluttered the flags and sails on yacht, schooner,
and sloop under the wall of the Palisades.

That day the North River was more green than blue--like the eyes of a
girl he knew; summer, crowned and trimmed with green, brooded on the
long rock rampart across the stream. Turquoise patches of sky and big
clouds, leafy parapets, ships passing to the sea; and in mid-stream an
anchored island of steel painted white and buff, bristling with long
thin guns, the flower-like flag rippling astern; another battle-ship
farther north; another, another; and farther still the white
tomb--unlovely mansion of the dead--on outpost duty above the river,
guarding with the warning of its dead glories the unlovely mansions of
the living ranged along the most noble terrace in the world.

And everywhere to north, south, and east, the endless waste of city,
stark, clean-cut, naked alike of tree and of art, unsoftened even by the
haze of its own exudations--everywhere the window-riddled blocks of
oblongs and cubes gridironed with steel rails--New York in all the
painted squalor of its Pueblo splendour.

* * * * *

"You say you are doing well in everything except French and Italian?"

Dolly, still humming to her own accompaniment, looked over her shoulder
and nodded.

"Well, how the dickens are you ever going to sing at either Opera or on
the road or anywhere if you don't learn French and Italian?"

"I'm trying, Louis."

"Go ahead; let's hear something, then."

And she sang very intelligently and in excellent taste:

"Pendant que, plein d'amour, j'expire a votre porte,
Vous dormez d'un paisible sommeil--"

and turned questioningly to him.

"That's all right; try another."

So, serenely obedient, she sang:

"Chantons Margot, nos amours,
Margot leste et bien tournee--"

"Well, I don't see anything the matter with your French," he muttered.

The girl coloured with pleasure, resting pensively above the key-board;
but he had no further requests to make and presently she swung around on
the pian