gain?
You pull me back with your wee white hands; I will talk to you for an
hour longer, if I may hold the little kittens in my own. I may? And kiss
each finger afterward? Ah! you dear child! Well, then--

'Are you going to Van Wyck's to-night, Lenox?' asked Bertha of me, as we
rose from dinner, a month afterward.

'Yes, after the opera. And you? I fancy--yes--from your eyes.'

Bertha did not answer, and I strolled up stairs into the little back
drawing room. From the library above I could hear Fanny's merry voice
and the ring of Nap's cheery replies. Such a comfort as it was to me to
see those two so fond of each other. You see I am, in a way, Fanny's
father, and took no very great credit to myself when she half laid her
hand in the extended one of Snowe. How curiously that witch Harry
managed the thing, though! Dear little Fan; she stood in more than one
twilight by the garden window, and whispered over: '_Addio_, FRANCESCA!
_addio_, CECCO!' and Snowe faded in the returning spring of her heart,
and into the blooming vista of their separation, hopefully walked Nap,
and was welcomed with many smiles.

This afternoon, I walked over to the garden window, and there was Harry,
scrawling an old, bearded hermit on the glass with her diamond ring. We
both looked out--nothing much to see--a New York garden, thirty feet
square, with the usual gorgeousness of our winter flowers!

'You are thinking of Shiraz, Harry.'

'Yes,' said she, dreamily, 'I am thinking of Shiraz!'

She didn't say it, but don't you suppose I knew just as well that she
was wishing for her Vulcan and a great rose garden? I began to sing the
'Last Man,' but didn't succeed admirably; then I lighted my pipe--Harry
didn't mind, you know, indeed she only looked at it wishfully.

'In my rose garden,' said she, with a laugh, 'I shall smoke to kill the
rosebugs.'

'Don't wait,' said I, taking down a dainty _ecume de mer_ (the back
drawing room was my peculiar 'study,' and the repository of several
gentlemanly 'improprieties'), and I adjusted the amber mouth piece to
the cherry stem, 'Don't wait for Persia, make your rose garden here.'

Harry shook her head: 'You know, Len,' she said, 'that my roses would
grow like so many witches in a Puritan soil. I always thought that story
of the Norwegians' taking rosebuds for bulbs of fire, and being
terrified, was a very delicate and poetical satire upon _all_
superstition.'

'Are you going to wash away _all_ supers