ably one of the most refined ways known of tickling one's
little vanity.... How full of good deeds you are these days. You're
thinking of the poor again, I'm right?"

"I must have been. There's nobody else who'd take money from you, is
there?"

"Oh, isn't there? I must introduce you to high finance some day."

"Well," said Carlisle, "I meant just to give it away--to anybody--just
to show how free and superior you are, or something.... Silly, isn't it?
What's your happiness rule, Hugo?"

He replied with the readiness of a man who has been over this path long
ago:

"To have the capacity to want things very much, and the ability to get
them."

And he squeezed the little hand he held, as if to say that he had both
wanted much and gotten much.

Carlisle was much struck with this rule, which she now saw to have been
her own and mamma's all their lives long. After duly complimenting Hugo
upon it, she said:

"Here's another one, a man told me once: 'Cultivate your sympathies all
the time, and do something useful.'"

"That's orthodox! It was a young curate with a lisp who told you, I'll
wager."

"Very warm!" she laughed, struck again by his astuteness. "It was your
hoodoo--Dr. Vivian! And, oh, now that I think of it, he gave me that
other pointer, too,--about giving away money."

Hugo replied: "The man seems to be dripping with wise old saws, in a
thoroughly inexpensive sort of way.... Well, we'll show him something
about giving away money some day."

He was silent a moment, and Carlisle then remembered her thought of
another large subscription to the Settlement, which she, for her part,
could easily make now with fifty thousand dollars all her own. But
Canning obliterated all such reflections by turning and taking her
abruptly in his arms.

"_This_ is what I want to make me happy. Darling--darling!..."

They sat on the shabby old leather lounge which papa had held fast to,
by winter and by summer, for thirty years. Here they had sat down soon
after eight o'clock, and now the soft-toned chimes in the hall had just
sounded eleven-thirty. In the first days of their engagement, Carlisle
had observed that Hugo was "very demonstrative." And now, at the end of
their loverly evening together, he became suddenly and strangely moved,
professing, in a voice unlike his own, his inability to live longer
without her. Then, ignoring all their elaborate plannings, he abruptly
begged her to marry him in June, as he had first