f, when Sir Penthony comes home and sees her, they should both fall
in love with each other?"

"Charming, but highly improbable. The fates are seldom so propitious.
It is far more likely they will fall madly in love with two other
people, and be unhappy ever after."

"Oh, cease such raven's croaking," says Molly, laying her hand upon his
lips. "I will not listen to it. Whatever the Fates may be, Love, I
know, is kind."

"Is it?" asks he, wistfully. "You are my love--are you kind?"

"And you are my lover," returns Molly. "And you most certainly are not
kind, for that is the third time you have all but run that horrid
umbrella into my left eye. Surely, because you hold it up for your own
personal convenience is no reason why you should make it an instrument
of torture to every one else. Now you may finish picking those
strawberries without me, for I shall not stay here another instant in
deadly fear of being blinded for life."

With this speech--so flagrantly unjust as to render her companion
dumb--she rises, and catching up her gown, runs swiftly away from him
down the garden-path, and under the wealthy trees, until at last the
garden-gate receives her in its embrace and hides her from his view.

CHAPTER VIII.

"Thine eyes I love, and they as pitying me,
Knowing thy heart, torment me with disdain."

--Shakespeare.

All round one side of Brooklyn, and edging on to the retired butcher's
country residence, or rather what he is pleased to term, with a knowing
jerk of the thumb over his right shoulder, his "little villar in the
south," stretches a belt of trees, named by courtesy "the wood." It is
a charming spot, widening and thickening toward one corner, which has
been well named the "Fairies' Glen," where crowd together all the
"living grasses" and wild flowers that thrive and bloom so bravely when
nursed on the earth's bosom.

On one side rise gray rocks, cold and dead, save for the little happy
life that, springing up above, flows over them, leaping, laughing from
crag to crag, bedewing leaf and blossom, and dashing its gem-like spray
over all the lichens and velvet mosses and feathery ferns that grow
luxuriantly to hide the rugged jags of stone.

Here, at night, the owls delight to hoot, the bats go whirring past,
the moonbeams surely cast their kindest rays; by day the pigeons coo
from the topmost boughs their tales of love, while squirrels sit
blinking merrily, or run their Si