h
his flowing mustache and his wing of fine jet black hair above his ivory
tinted face, Laura Nesbit considered him reflectively, and catalogued
him.

"Tom," explained the daughter to her father rather coldly one morning,
after the young man had been reading Swinburne in his deep, mellow
pipe-organ of a voice to the family until bedtime the night before, "Tom
Van Dorn, father, is the kind of a man who needs the influence of some
strong woman!"

Mrs. Nesbit glanced at her husband furtively and caught his grin as he
piped gayly:

"Who also must carry the night key!"

The three laughed but the daughter went on with the cataloguing: "He is
a young man of strong predilections, of definite purpose and more than
ordinary intellectual capacity."

"And so far as I have counted, Laura," her father interrupted again, "I
haven't found an honest hair in his handsome head; though I haven't
completed the count yet!" The father smiled amiably as he made the final
qualification.

The girl caught the mother's look of approval shimmering across the
table and laughed her gay, bell-like chime. "O, you've made a bad guess,
mother."

Again she laughed gayly: "It's not for me to open a school for the
Direction of Miscalculated Purposes. Still," this she said seriously, "a
strong woman is what he needs."

"Not omitting the latch-key," gibed her father, and the talk drifted
into another current.

The next Sunday afternoon young Tom Van Dorn appeared with Rossetti
added to his Swinburne, and crowded Morty Sands clear out of the hammock
so that Morty had to sleep in a porch chair, and woke up frequently and
was unhappy. While the gilded youth slept the Woman woke and listened,
and Morty was left disconsolate.

The shadows were long and deep when Tom Van Dorn rose from the hammock,
closed his book, and stood beside the girl, looking with a gentle
tenderness from the burning depths of his black eyes into her eyes. He
paused before starting away, and held up a hand so that she could see,
wound about it, a flaxen hair, probably drawn from the hammock pillow.
He smiled rather sadly, dropped his eyes to the book closed in his
hands, and quoted softly:

"'And around his heart, one strangling golden hair!'"

He did not speak again, but walked off at a great stride down the stone
path to the street. The next day Rossetti's sonnets came to Laura Nesbit
in a box of roses.

The Sunday following Laura Nesbit made it a point to go with he