ation
about her. The breakfast was dull and cheerless. The autumn sun was
brilliant. The inevitable gig appeared at the door. Alec was not even
to drive it. He could only help her into it, kiss her gloved hand on
the rail, and see her vanish behind the shrubbery.

He then turned in stern endurance, rushed up into the very room he had
thought it impossible ever to enter again, caught up a handkerchief she
had left behind her, pressed it to his face, threw himself on her bed,
and--well, he fell fast asleep.

He woke not so miserable as he had expected. Of this he was so much
ashamed that he tried hard to make himself more miserable, by going
over all the miseries in store for him. But his thoughts would not obey
him. They would take their own way, fly where they pleased, and alight
where they would. And the meeting in November was the most attractive
object in sight.--So easily is Hope born, when the time of her birth is
come!

But he soon found that Grief is like some maidens: she will not come
when she is called; but if you leave her alone, she will come of
herself. Before the day was over he had sacrificed griefs enough upon
the altar of Love. All at once the whole vacant region rushed in upon
him with a ghostly sense of emptiness and desolation. He wandered about
the dreary house like a phantom about a cenotaph. The flowers having
nothing to say, because they had ceased to mean anything, looked
ashamed of themselves. The sunshine was hastening to have done with it,
and let the winter come as soon as he liked, for there was no more use
in shining like this. And Alec being in love, could feel all this,
although he had not much imagination. For the poetic element has its
share in the most common pug-faced man in creation; and when he is in
love, what of that sort there is in him, as well as what there is of
any sort of good thing, will come to the surface, as the trout do in
the balmy summer evenings. Therefore let every gentle maiden be warned
how she takes such a manifestation of what is in the man for the man
himself. It is the deepest, it is the best in him, but it may not be in
the least his own yet. It is one thing to have a mine of gold in one's
ground, know it, and work it; and another to have the mine still but
regard the story as a fable, throw the aureal hints that find their way
to the surface as playthings to the woman who herself is but a
plaything in the owner's eyes, and mock her when she takes them fo