ing cold and hard in her
uncultured garden; what water would soonest make them grow? Not all the
waters of Damascus will turn mere sand sifted of eternal winds into
fruitful soil; but Letty's soul could not be such. And then literature
has seed to sow as well as water for the seed sown. Letty's foolish
words about the hands that wrote poetry showed a shadow of respect for
poetry--except, indeed, the girl had been but making game of him, which
he was far from ready to believe, and for which, he said to himself,
her face was at the time much too earnest, and her hands much too busy;
he must find out whether she had any instincts, any predilections, in
the matter of poetry!

Thus pondering, he forgot all about his projected ride, and, going up
to the study he had contrived for himself in the rambling roof of the
ancient house, began looking along the backs of his books, in search of
some suggestion of how to approach Letty; his glance fell on a
beautifully bound volume of verse--a selection of English lyrics, made
with tolerable judgment--which he had bought to give, but the very
color of which, every time his eye flitting along the book-shelves
caught it, threw a faint sickness over his heart, preluding the memory
of old pain and loss:

"It may as well serve some one," he said, and, taking it down, carried
it with him to the saddle-room.

Letty was not there, and the perfect order of the place somehow made
him feel she had been gone some time. He went in search of her; she
might be in the dairy.

That was the very picture of an old-fashioned English
dairy--green-shadowy, dark, dank, and cool--floored with great
irregular slabs, mostly of green serpentine, polished into smooth
hollows by the feet of generations of mistresses and dairy-maids. Its
only light came through a small window shaded with shrubs and ivy,
which stood open, and let in the scents of bud and blossom, weaving a
net of sweetness in the gloom, through which, like a silver thread,
shot the twittering song of a bird, which had inherited the gathered
carelessness and bliss of a long ancestry in God's aviary.

Godfrey came softly to the door, which he found standing ajar, and
peeped in. There stood Letty, warm and bright in the middle of the
dusky coolness. She had changed her dress since he saw her, and now, in
a pink-rosebud print, with the sleeves tucked above her elbows, was
skimming the cream in a great red-brown earthen pan. He pushed the door
a l