ery pleasant week
it was. To the old lady it was almost perfect happiness. She had her
dear Tony back with her after all his dangers and escapes, safe and
sound, and in such spirits as she had never seen him before. Not
a cloud, not a shadow, now ever darkened his bright face; all was
good-humor, and thoughtful kindness for herself and for Dolly.

And poor Dolly, too, with some anxious cares at her heart,--a load that
would have crushed many,--bore up so well that she looked as cheery as
the others, and entered into all the plans that Tony formed about his
future house, and his gardens and stables, as though many a hundred
leagues of ocean were not soon to roll between her and the spots she
traced so eagerly on the paper. One evening they sat even later than
usual. Tony had induced Dolly, who was very clever with her pencil,
to make him a sketch for a little ornamental cottage,--one of those
uninhabitable little homesteads, which are immensely suggestive of all
the comforts they would utterly fail to realize; and he leaned over her
as she drew, and his arm was on the back of her chair, and his face
so close at times that it almost touched the braids of the silky hair
beside him.

"You must make a porch there, Dolly; it would be so nice to sit there
with that noble view down the glen at one's feet, and three distinct
reaches of the Nore visible."

"Yes, I'll make a porch; I'll even make you yourself lounging in it See,
it shall be perfect bliss!"

"What does that mean?"

"That means smoke, sir; you are enjoying the heavenly luxury of tobacco,
not the less intensely that it obscures the view."

"No, Dolly, I'll not have that. If you put me there, don't have me
smoking; make me sitting beside you as we are now,--you drawing, and I
looking over you."

"But I want to be a prophet as well as a painter, Tony. I desire to
predict something that will be sure to happen, if you should ever build
this cottage."

"I swear I will,--I 'm resolved on it."

"Well, then, so sure as you do, and so sure as you sit in that little
honeysuckle-covered porch, you 'll smoke."

"And why not do as I say? Why not make you sketching--"

"Because I shall not be sketching; because, by the time your cottage is
finished, I shall probably be sketching a Maori chief, or a war-party
bivouacking on the Raki-Raki."

Tony drew away his arm and leaned back in his chair, a sense almost of
faintish sickness creeping over him.

"Here are the do