ynical. But--"
she looked her prettiest--"still I don't believe it."

John turned on her a hard glance which instantly softened. It is a
singular fact that the length and droop of a girl's eyelashes have great
weight in an argument.

"And yet," she resumed, but paused for John to wave away the train-boy
with his books.

"And yet what?" asked March, ever so kindly.

"And yet, that first love is everything, is what every woman would like
every man to believe, until he learns better." Her steadfast gaze and
slow smile made John laugh. He was about to give a railing answer when
the brakeman announced twenty minutes for dinner.

"What! It can't----" he looked at his watch. "Why, would you have
imagined?"

O yes; her only surprise--a mild one--was that he didn't know it.

At table she sat three seats away, with her Northern friends between;
and when they were again roaring over streams, and through hills and
valleys, and the commercial travelers, whose number had increased to
four, were discussing aerial navigation, and March cut short his
after-dinner smoke and came back to resume his conversation, he found
Miss Garnet talking to the Fairs, and not to be moved by the fact--which
he felt it the merest courtesy to state--that the best views were on the
other side of the car.

Thereupon he went to the car's far end and wrote a short letter to his
mother, who had exacted the pledge of one a day, which she did not
promise to answer.

In this he had some delay. A woman with a disabled mouth, cautiously
wiping crumbs off it with a paper napkin, asked him the time of day. She
explained that she had loaned her watch--gold--patent lever--to her
husband, who was a printer. She said the chain of the watch was made of
her mother's hair. She also stated that her husband was an atheist, and
had a most singular mole on his back, and that she had been called by
telegraph to the care of an aunt taken down with measles and whose
husband was a steamboat pilot, and an excellent self-taught banjoist;
that she, herself, had in childhood been subject to membranous croup,
which had been cured with pulsatilla, which the doctor had been told to
prescribe, by his grandmother, in a dream; also that her father,
deceased, was a man of the highest refinement, who had invented a
stump-extractor; that her sisters were passionately fond of her; that
she never spoke to strangers when traveling, but, somehow, he, March,
did not seem like a stranger