eard him calling from a long way off, 'Ho
Anita, my Anita, here are anemones for your beautiful Signora with the
bright hair.'

"They grow around an old tomb a mile away from his vineyard, and he set
out from his home long before light to get them for me; for he once saw
the Signora and he had heard me say that she never could have enough of
anemones. Iddio mio! but my heart is glad of them. Ah, the dearest of
Signoras!" and, with a tender touch, Anita laid the cool vine-leaves
lightly back upon the anemones and hurried on in search of Dora.

How One Woman Kept Her Husband.

Why my sister married John Gray, I never could understand. I was
twenty-two and she was eighteen when the marriage took place. They had
known each other just one year. He had been passionately in love with her
from the first day of their meeting. She had come more slowly to loving
him: but love him she did, with a love of such depth and fervor as are
rarely seen. He was her equal in nothing except position and wealth. He
had a singular mixture of faults of opposite temperaments. He had the
reticent, dreamy, procrastinating inertia of the bilious melancholic man,
side by side with the impressionable sensuousness, the sensitiveness and
sentimentalism of the most sanguine-nervous type. There is great charm in
such a combination, especially to persons of a keen, alert nature. My
sister was earnest, wise, resolute. John Gray was nonchalant, shrewd,
vacillating. My sister was exact, methodical, ready. John Gray was
careless, spasmodic, dilatory. My sister had affection. He had tenderness.
She was religious of soul; he had a sort of transcendental perceptivity,
so to speak, which kept him more alive to the comforts of religion than
to its obligations. My sister would have gone to the stake rather than
tell a lie. He would tell a lie unhesitatingly, rather than give anybody
pain. My sister lived earnestly, fully, actively, in each moment of the
present. It never seemed quite clear whether he were thinking of to-day,
yesterday, or to-morrow. She was upright because she could not help it. He
was upright,--when he was upright,--because of custom, taste, and the
fitness of things. What fatal discrepancies! what hopeless lack of real
moral strength, enduring purpose, or principle in such a nature as John
Gray's! When I said these things to my sister, she answered always, with a
quiet smile, "I love him." She neither admitted nor denied my accusations.