t too warm. "It's the very thing
for me," answered the lawyer, as they arose together and proceeded to
the French windows opening upon the verandah; "it's like 'Come into the
garden, Maud.'" They were outside by this time, and Miss Carmichael,
lifting a warning finger, said: "Mr. Coristine, I am a school teacher,
and am going to take you in hand as a naughty boy; you know that is not
for Sunday, don't you now?"

"If it was only another name that begins with the same letter," replied
the incorrigible Irishman, "I'd say the line would be good for any day
of the week in fine weather; but I'm more than willing to go to school
again."

"Sometimes," said the schoolteacher quietly, "sometimes the word
'garden' makes me sad. Papa had a great deal of trouble. He lost all his
children but me, and almost all his property, and he had quarrelled with
his relations in Scotland, or they had quarrelled with him; so that he
was, in spite of his public life, a lonely, afflicted man. When he was
dying, he repeated part of a hymn, and the refrain was 'The Garden of
Gethsemane.'"

"Ah, Miss Carmichael, dear, forgive me, the stupid, blundering idiot
that I am, to go and vex your tender heart with my silly nonsense. I'm
ashamed, and could cry to think of it."

"I will forgive you, Mr. Coristine," she replied, recovering from her
serious fit, and looking at the victim in a way that blended amusement
with imperiousness: "I will forgive you this once, if you promise future
good behaviour."

An impulse came over the lawyer to shake Miss Carmichael's hand, but she
made him no shadow of an excuse for so doing. It was plain that the
mutual confidences of the girls, which embraced, using the word in a
mere logical sense, their year long distant acquaintance with the
transformed pedestrians had given maturity to the closer and more
pleasant acquaintance of the day. Little Marjorie's appropriation of the
lawyer as her Eugene added another ripening element to its growth; so
that the two garden explorers felt none of the stiffness and uncertainty
of a first introduction. What Miss Carmichael's thoughts were she only
could tell, but she knew that the impetuous and affectionate Coristine
required the merest trifle of encouragement to change the steady
decorous tide of advancing knowledge and respect into an abruptly
awkward cataract, threatening the rupture of pleasant relations or the
loss of self-respect. She would have preferred talking with Wilki