nalytical. When happiness comes my way, I shrink back. I keep my
emotions in the background, while my brain works, dissecting, wondering,
speculating. Perhaps what he says is true. I believe that if one gets
into the habit of analyzing too much, one loses all elasticity of
emotion, the capacity to recognize and embrace the great things when
they come."

"I think you have been right," John declared earnestly. "If the great
things come as they should come, they are overwhelming, they will carry
you off your feet. You will forget to speculate and to analyze.
Therefore, I think you have been wise and right to wait. You have run no
risk of having to put up with the lesser things."

She leaned toward him across the rose-shaded table. For those few
seconds they seemed to have been brought into a wonderfully intimate
communion of thought. A wave of her hair almost touched his forehead.
His hand boldly rested upon her fingers.

"You talk," she whispered, "as if we were back upon your hilltops once
more!"

He turned his head toward the little orchestra, which was playing a low
and tremulous waltz tune.

"I want to believe," he said, "that you can listen to the music here and
yet live upon the hilltops."

"You believe that it is possible?"

"I do indeed," he assured her. "Although my heart was almost sick with
loneliness, I do not think that I should be here if I did not believe
it. I have not come for anything else, for any lesser things, but to
find--"

For once his courage failed him. For once, too, he failed to understand
her expression. She had drawn back a little, her lips were quivering.
Sophy broke suddenly in upon that moment of suspended speech.

"I knew how it would be!" she exclaimed. "I leave you both alone for
less than a minute, and there you sit, as grave as two owls. I ask you,
now, is this the place to wander off into the clouds? When two people
sit looking at each other as you were doing a minute ago, here in
Luigi's, at midnight, with champagne in their glasses, and a supper,
ordered regardless of expense, on the table before them, they are either
without the least sense of the fitness of things, or else--"

"Or else what?" Louise asked.

"Or else they are head over heels in love with each other!" Sophy
concluded.

"Perhaps the child is right," Louise assented tolerantly, taking a peach
from the basket by her side. "Evidently it is our duty to abandon
ourselves to the frivolity of the moment. Wh