hen, and a tear was in her eye. "Penny dear,
when all is said, 'Believe me' is the dearer song of the two. Anybody
can sing, feel, live, the first, which is but a youthful dream, after
all; but the other has in it the proved fidelity of the years. The first
song belongs to me, I know, and it is all I am fit for now; but I want
to grow toward and deserve the second."

"You are right; but while Love's Young Dream is yours and Ronald's,
dear, take all the joy that it holds for you. The other song is for
Salemina and Dr. Gerald, and I only hope they are realising it at this
moment--secretive, provoking creatures that they are!"

The old organist left his pupil just then, and disappeared through a
little door in the rear.

"Have you the Wedding March there?" I asked the pupil who had been
practising the love-songs.

"Oh yes, madam, though I am afraid I cannot do it justice," he replied
modestly. "Are you interested in organ music?"

"I am very much interested in yours, and I am still more interested in a
romance that has been dragging its weary length along for twenty years,
and is trying to bring itself to a crisis just on the other side of that
screen. You can help me precipitate it, if you only will!"

Well, he was young and he was an Irishman, which is equivalent to being
a born lover, and he had been brought up on Tommy Moore and music--all of
which I had known from the moment I saw him, else I should not have made
the proposition. I peeped from behind the screen. Ronald and Himself
were walking toward us; Salemina and Dr. Gerald were sitting together in
one of the front pews. I beckoned to my husband.

"Will you and Ronald go quietly out one of the side doors," I asked,
"take your own car, and go back to the hotel, allowing us to follow you
a little later?"

It takes more than one year of marriage for even the cleverest Benedict
to uproot those weeds of stupidity, denseness, and non-comprehension
that seem to grow so riotously in the mental garden of the bachelor;
so, said Himself, "We came all together; why shouldn't we go home all
together?" (So like a man! Always reasoning from analogy; always, so to
speak, 'lugging in' logic!)

"Desperate situations demand desperate remedies," I replied
mysteriously, though I hope patiently. "If you go home at once without
any questions, you will be virtuous, and it is more than likely that you
will also be happy; and if you are not, somebody else will be."

Having seen