s and very miserable for
two days. The trouble was that she would not marry him.

This was not altogether strange, for Richard Shafer was only twenty
and had just finished his second year in college. To Carola Brune, who
was a year younger, he seemed perfect as a playmate, but she simply
could not imagine him as a husband. He was too vague, unformed, boyish
in his moods and caprices. She was a strong girl, with quick and
powerful impulses in her nature, and she felt that she would need a
strong man to hold her. What Richard was, what he would be, she could
not clearly see. She loved to make music with him--she at the piano,
he with his violin. She loved to roam the woods with him, and to go
out in a canoe with him on the moonlit river. But she could not and
she would not say that she loved _him_--at least, not enough to
promise to marry him now.

He took her "no" very hard. He argued the case persistently. There
were no real obstacles, that he could see, to their marriage. She was
the daughter of a musician, a Bohemian, who would make no objections
to an unworldly match. He was an orphan with a little patrimony of
four or five thousand dollars, enough to live on until the world
recognised his genius as a poet and his mastery as a violinist.

At this, unfortunately, being a little nervous and overstrained by the
long pleading, she laughed. "Oh, Dick!" she cried. "Swinburne and
Sarasate--two single gentlemen rolled into one!"

Now there is nothing that a boy--or for that matter, a man--dislikes
so much as laughter when he is making a declaration of love. His sense
of humour at that time is in eclipse, and even the gentlest turn of
wit shocks him deeply.

"Very well," he answered, rising from their favourite seat among the
roots of an old hemlock tree overhanging the stream, "let us go back
to the hotel. I have been a silly ass, I suppose, and now it's all
over."

"But why?"--she was tempted to ask him as they walked through the
woods. Why was it all over? Why shouldn't they go on being good
friends and comrades? Couldn't he see that she had only tried to make
a little joke to ease the strain? Didn't he know that she really had a
wonderful admiration for his talents and a large hope for his future?

But something held her back from speaking. She was embarrassed and
slightly ashamed. He was in a strange mood, evidently offended,
absurdly polite and distant, making talk about the concert that was to
come off that ev