had the least,
least reason to think I would marry you, and now, according to your own
words, you think you have less. Then why, pray, did you address me?"

"Because I am a man, I suppose. I could not sit tamely down and see
you go."

She looked at him with a slight access of interest. A man? Perhaps he
was, after all. And his well-bred, bony face looked very determined,
albeit the eyes were wistful. Suddenly she felt sorry for him; and she
had never experienced a pang of sympathy for a suitor before. She
leaned forward and patted his hand.

"I cannot marry you, dear Weeliam," she said, and never had he seen her
so sweet and adorable, although he noted with a pang that her mouth was
already drawn with a firmer line. "But what matter? I shall never
marry at all. For many years--forty, fifty perhaps--I shall sit here
on the veranda, and you shall read to me."

And then she shivered violently. But she set her mouth until it was
almost straight, and picked up the little dress. "Not that, perhaps,"
she said quietly in a moment. "I sometimes think I should like to be a
nun, that, after all, it is my vocation. Not a cloistered one, for that
is but a selfish life. But to teach, to do good, to forget myself.
There are no convents in California, but I could join the Third Order
of the Franciscans, and wear the gray habit, and be set aside by the
world as one that only lived to make it a little better. To forget
oneself! That, after all, may be the secret of happiness. I envy none
of my friends that are married. They have the dear children, it is
true. But the children grow up and go away, and then one is fat and
eats many dulces and the siesta grows longer and longer and the face
very brown. That is life in California. I should prefer to work and
pray, and"--with a flash of insight that made her drop her work again
and stare through the rose-vines--"to dream always of some beautiful
thing that youth promised but never gave, and that given might have
ended in dull routine and a brain so choked with little things that
memory too held nothing else."

"But Concha," cried Sturgis eagerly, "I could give you far better than
that. I could take you away from here--to Boston, to Europe. You
should see--live your life--in the great cities you have dreamed
of--that you hardly believe in--that were made to enjoy. I have told
you of the theater, the opera--you should go to the finest in the
world. You should wear the