AFTER an unsubstantial dinner of grilled sweetbreads and mushrooms, and a frozen pudding, he continued his interrupted letter: “But there isn't any use in my trying to write my love in words; it won't go into words, even inside of me I can't explain it—it seems as if instead of its being a part of me that I am a part of it, of something too big for me to see the end of.” Then he became practicable, and wrote optimistically of the things that were soon to be.

There was a letter box at the upper corner of the street, and, passing the porch, he saw the biologist sunk in an attitude of profound dejection. His daughter sat with bare arms and neck at his side; her hair was bound in a gleaming mass about her ears, and one hand was laid upon the man's shoulder, while she patted Thomas Huxley with the other. The dog rose, growling belligerently at the unfamiliar figure, but sank again beneath a sharp command. When he returned Rufus Hardinge greeted him, and turned to his daughter with a murmured suggestion, but she shook her head in decisive negation. A light shone palely in the long windows at their back. The sun, at its skyey, evening toilette, seemed, in the rosy glow of westering candles, to scatter a cloud of powdered gold over the worn and huddled shoulders of the world.

Suddenly, seemingly in reconsideration of her decision, she called, “Oh, Anthony!” and he retraced his steps to the porch. “My father suggests that you sit here,” she told him distantly. “He says that you are very young, and that solitude is not good for you.”

“Annot,” the older man protested humorously, “you have mangled my intent beyond any recognition.” With an unstudied, friendly gesture he tended Anthony his cigar case. A deep preoccupation enveloped him; he sat with loose hands and unseeing eyes. In the deepening twilight his countenance was grey. Anthony had taken a position upon the edge of the porch, his feet in the fragrant grass, out of which fireflies rose glimmering, mounting higher and higher, until, finally, they disappeared into the night above, in the pale birth of the stars.

A deep silence enfolded them until in an unexpected, low voice, Rufus Hardinge repeated mechanically aloud lines called, evidently, out of a memory of long ago:

''Within thy beams, Oh, Sun! or who could find,

While fly, and leaf, and insect stood revealed,

That too,” he paused, groping in his memory for

the words:

“That too such countless orbs thou madst us

blind.”

The girl rose, and drew his head into her warm, young arms. “Don't, father,” she cried, in a sudden, throbbing apprehension; “please... please. You have the clearest, most beautiful eyes in the world. Think of all they have seen and understood—” He patted her absently. Anthony moved silently away.