The snow has gone from the ground, the frost from the air, blustering March is paving the way for tearful April. Miss Pauline Lefroy, luxuriously basking in an easy-chair by the fire, a limp manuscript resting on her knee, is murmuring words of sweetest love in a low, monotonous voice to Mr. Everard, stretched on the rug at her feet—words which reach Mrs. Armstrong in detached sentences, as she sits by the window, sewing, a sufficiently listless and preoccupied chaperone to satisfy even the most exacting lover.

"'And what a beautiful ring!'"

"'And you like this ring? Ah, it has indeed a luster since your eyes have shone on it! Henceforth hold me, sweet enchantress, the Slave of the Ring!'" he answers, in impassioned accents.

"Oh, dear," muses Addie, "what high-flown rubbish! I don't think such wooing would win me. Pauline must be of different metal—rather soft metal, I should say. 'Sweet enchantress,' 'slave of the ring!' I'm glad Tom didn't make such a fool of himself when—when we were courting. Heigh-ho, what a long afternoon it is! I wonder will the boys turn up early? Robert has not been here for two Saturdays running. I—"

"'There is something glorious in the heritage of command. A man who has ancestors is like a representative of the past,'" says Pauline, in haughty melodramatic accents.

"Stuff, Pauline, stuff!" mutters her sister, impatiently tugging at her knotted thread. "Precious heritage of command our ancestors have given us! Nice representatives some of our forefathers were! If Bob or Hal took to representing them, I wonder what—"

"'Ah, Pauline, not to the past, but to the future looks true nobility, and finds its blazon in posterity.'"

"Come, that sounds like nonsense, as well as I can make out. Why, Jack Everard, will you always speak to Pauline as if your windpipe were padded with cotton-wool; it can't make her love you, and it is so exasperating when you want to hear—"

"'No, no, I would not, were I fifty times a prince, be a pensioner on the dead. I honor birth and ancestry when they are regarded as the incentives to exertion, not the title-deeds to sloth!'"

"'Not the title-deeds to sloth!'" repeats Addie, leaning forward eagerly to catch the falling cadence of his voice as it approaches a period.

"'It is our fathers I emulate when I desire that beneath the evergreen I myself have planted my own ashes may repose. Dearest, couldst thou see with my eyes!'"

Addie, looking up, sees her husband standing inside the door, smiling at the fireside duet. She beckons him to her, noiselessly makes room for him on the couch, and with her finger pressed to her lips motions him to listen.

Armstrong's face is a study of ludicrous amazement as the words fall in musical sequence from Everard's lips, and, when Pauline, leaning over him, murmurs ardently, "'My own dear love!'" he half rises to his feet; but Addie's hand detains him.

"'A palace lifting to eternal summer,'" continues the lover bleatingly; and then a ray of enlightenment crosses Armstrong's perplexed face, his restlessness subsides, he leans back and watches wistfully the mobile flushing face of his young wife, as she, bending forward eagerly with hands clasped, drinks in the luscious picture of wedded bliss that the gardener-poet paints for her he loves so cruelly. As he continues, Everard's delivery improves; the wooliness leaves his voice, and a ring of true passion which no art could ever teach him vibrates through his every tone and finds an echo in Addie's heart, thrilling through her like an electric current in which pain and pleasure are so subtly blended that she can not tell which predominates.

Addie turns to her husband with dewy eyes, and lays her hand timidly on his breast, echoing the last eager words—"'Dost thou like the picture?'"—in a soft whisper.

"I don't know—I did not listen," he answers dreamily. "I never could thrill to Melnotte's lyre. It is too measured, too smooth, too flowery to breathe the fire of earth-born passion."

"Then you do not believe in the eloquence of love?"

"No. I believe that the voice of love—the love man feels but once in a life—finds no polished utterance. It is most times dumb, strangled by the impotence, the poverty of words, or else finds vent in harsh, uncouth, halting measure. It never pleads in flowing rhythm; if it could, more lovers would be successful. You could be won, Addie, by honeyed words. I read it in your face as you sat listening."

"You gave me no honeyed words, no measured music, and yet—and yet—" Her whisper is drowned by Pauline's "stagey" metallic voice—

"There—that will do for to-day, Melnotte. Go back to your spade and wheelbarrow. We know our parts to perfection. I'm sick of rehearsing."

"That last scene, Pauline—we're not up in it yet—"

"Pauline! Mr. Everard, what do you mean?"

"I mean Pauline Deschappelles, of course."

"I see, I see. The last scene? Oh, I'm up in it thoroughly; and, besides, I have not time now! I must write a line to Florrie before post-time."

She turns away lightly, and Everard's eyes, following her despondently, rest on the husband and wife sitting side by side.

"I did not know you were there," he says, strolling moodily toward them. "What did you think of it?"

"We thought it capital," answers Armstrong encouragingly. "That last bit was most touchingly delivered—quite up to Barry Sullivan."

"Oh, I feel I shall do my part right enough; but your sister, Mrs. Armstrong, is not up to the mark! Don't you feel it—eh? She's very well—perfection, in fact—in the light, frivolous parts; but where the ring of passion comes in she is hard, stagey, unfeeling. She is not Bulwer's Pauline, she's herself—Pauline Lefroy—and no coaching, no training, will make her anything else."

"Why not suggest her giving the part to a more competent person? I am sure she would fall in with your wish at once," says Addie, a little hurt at the young man's plain and truthful speaking. He does not answer, does not even seem to hear; then, suddenly, after an uncomfortable pause, he bursts out in doleful appeal—

"Mrs. Armstrong, tell me—do you think I have a ghost of a chance?"

"A ghost of a chance of what?"

"Of winning your sister, of getting her to like me?"

Mr. Everard is a young gentleman of limited reserve, and from the first has made no effort to disguise his devotion to Pauline, yet this point-blank attack takes Addie somewhat aback.

"I—I really don't know, Mr. Everard," she stammers. "I can not tell. Why not ask her yourself?"

"Ask her myself! Why, I have asked her myself at least fourteen times in the last month."

"Fourteen times, by Jove!" exclaims Armstrong—"fourteen times! I did not know till now that Jacob was of British breed."

"And what does she say?" asks Addie, eagerly.

"Oh, she says the same thing always—she's over-young to marry yet! She says that she won't be able to make up her mind for ever so long, that she has not the faintest idea whether she likes me or dislikes me, that it would be of no use trying to find out until she is older, and all that sort of thing. You see, Mrs. Armstrong, she doesn't encourage, and yet she doesn't discourage, and—and—there I am!"

"And there I wouldn't stay!" says Addie, impetuously. "I'd make her say 'Yes' or 'No,' and have done with it at once."

"If I did so, it would be 'No' at once, and—and—" with a quiver in his voice—"I don't think I could bear that. I love your sister, Mrs. Armstrong, better than my life; so I would rather go on clinging to a straw, hang on to her patiently, and perhaps in the end work her into liking me. They say love begets love, don't they? If so, she must in time take a spark from me."

"And how long do you intend going on burning?"

"Until she is twenty. She says that she won't make up her mind to marry any one until she has seen a little of the world, that many girls sacrifice their life's happiness by taking the first man that asks them, that she, even herself, in her limited experience, has seen too much of the misery of hasty and incongruous marriages to risk a mistake herself—Eh—what's the matter? Dropped your scissors, Mrs. Armstrong? Why, here they are beside you! So she won't accept any one until she is twenty; however, I'll wait and watch, and nag and worry her for two years more, and you'll put in a word for me now and then, won't you, both of you? She'll never get any one to love her as well as I do; and I'm not badly off, Mrs. Armstrong. Your husband here can look into my affairs, prod my property as much as he likes; he'll find it in paying order, swept and garnished for matrimony, drained and fenced, and—"

"I do not doubt it, Mr. Everard," breaks in Addie, earnestly; "and I do not mind admitting that both my husband and I—is it not so, Tom?—quite approve your suit and wish you good speed; but I do not approve of your resolution to hang on to Pauline by the careless thread of hope she offers. You may only reap much misery and disappointment in the future. She knows you love her—you have told her so. I would leave her, let her go her own way during the time she specifies; and then, if you are of the same mind still, renew your offer, propose for the fifteenth and last time."

"Mrs. Armstrong, were you ever in love?"

"In—in—love!" she stammers with crimson face. "In love!" She makes a mighty effort to give a light evasive answer; but a lump in her throat stifles her utterance.

Her husband comes to the rescue with cheerful tact.

"My dear Everard," he says, in mock indignation, "will you please remember that I am a man and a husband? If you press the question home, allow me time to vanish at least from—"

"Beg pardon, I'm sure," the young man mutters, in some confusion. "I did not know what I was saying. What a duffer I am, to be sure, always blurting out the wrong thing at the wrong moment. Forgive me, Mrs. Armstrong, I assure you I never—"

"Look, Addie—there are some visitors coming up the avenue! Who are they?" asks Armstrong hastily, with much apparent interest.

"By Jove," exclaims Everard, his ruddy face turning green with jealousy, "if it's not Stanhope Peckham again! Every time I come to this house I find that sprawling bru—fellow, tracking my footsteps. By Heaven, it would be too monotonous if it were not so exasperating! How any woman can stand a man who wears such trousers and such collars beats my comprehension! Of all the howling Bond Street cads I ever—I say, Mrs. Armstrong, do you know what little Loo Hawker christened him? Sharp girl, that little Loo! Collared Head—ha, ha! Collared Head!"

"Collared Head! How?"

"Don't you see? Because his face is so mottled and spotty, and his collars throttle him up to the ears, Collared Head—by Jove, it's about the best thing I ever heard! If 'Punch' could only get hold of it! Collared Head—ha, ha!"

"Addie," says Armstrong, in a low voice, "I want to say something to you. Will you come into my study for a few minutes?"

"Yes. What is it?"

"I am going away—"

"Going away! Where—when—how long?"