"Pity I can't keep the vibration. No, it is in some natures as they listen to give a rich, full echo to a very sharp and griding sound." "Bosh and blarney!" exclaimed Grandpa Aubichon. "Honey, what are you drawing?" "Oh, just faces." "What faces?" "See if you can tell." head till the wide veins roughly ridged it, his temples throbbed, his eyes flashed, and with that a great darkness swept off his face like the shadow of a sailing cloud, smiles rippled round his lips, and his eyes showered out light through the purple air as if a star were dissolving in their melting tenderness. For a time he stood so, as silent, as beautiful, as frozen as a statue, then he commenced walking up and down the room and unwittingly varying his movement as if to keep time with his thoughts. A band of wan "Not I. The man in the moon? or the man without a shadow? or any body's Doppelgänger?" "I suppose it is Prince Athanase," said Mr. Ambrose at a glance, coming and leaning ondering harpers struck their strings in quick fanthe back of her chair, Though his life day after day is it not?" "If you choose. I hadn't any thing but the moment's fancies." And then the color flew over Melicent's throat and cheek, for she saw there the wave of the hair on the temple, the curve of the check, the droop of the mouth, that she hoped it were possible he himself had not seen. "Ah yes," said Mr. Ambrose, with a slight start, and then a film of thought hazing slowly over his eyes, "I can comprehend;" and he sauntered back to his seat. tastic tune somewhere out-doors. "Come, Melicent, let us waltz," he said; and together they went floating off in dreamy circles. Faster swept the hurrying strings without in their hazy unison, faster would have swept the steps within; but Melicent chose to linger on the beat, and with a lengthened languor swam in slower rise and fall. They seemed like the figures of a dream floating there, like blossoms blown by a murmuring wind, the darkness entered to gather and steal up about them—the phantoms of some graceful court, the creatures of the tune. A moonbeam rose and transmuted the soft gloom to amethystine mist, the harpers drew further away, their motion fell ever slower and slower till in stately grace it ceased. Then Grandpa Aubichon came in, and, finding nobody disposed to talk, dropped asleep, and sitting down by him Melicent began to smooth his hair and roll the thick silver rings about her finger, and quiet settled on every object while the chiming clocks twice sung the hour, and the roses shook in fragrant response at the casement. Mr. Ambrose, still radiant, though silent, was standing half wrapped in the folds that always shrouded the picture of Melicent's mother. But after this another mood had fallen on Mr. Ambrose; the summer sweetness was veiled, and the old less lovely phase arose. Other people dropped in with the afternoon; a bluff sea-captain and his merchant for a chat with Grandpa Aubichon, a lady, a child. Mr. Ambrose surveyed them a second-he knew them of old and they were not to his taste-so tossing them a brief nod and word he relapsed into silence. And so for hours he sat, neither speaking, nor sleeping, nor dreaming, but just "Melicent," he said, abruptly, in one of moodily rapt. A man who had wasted his those singular tones that are scarcely to be whole youth in weak and wandering sin might heard by another than the one addressed, "Play have worn that weary guise at length; but he-it again! Sound that master-chord, that soluthere was scarcely a spot on his life, albeit the tion, that voice of the dumb soul, that key to soul was not all unstained. Nor did he join my secret!" them at the tea-table by-and-by, but moved his "I can not play it again, Mr. Ambrose," she hand impatiently in sign to be let alone, for all said. "It just came over me then like an inGrandpa Aubichon's resounding voice and Meli-spiration. I don't know how to play." cent's gay clink of china. But when the latter brought him a cup of chocolate loaded with drowsy fragrance, and tiny crisp cakes baked from a recipe of Rose Standish's she said, he could not refuse to be beguiled into tasting. "Melicent," he said, suddenly, by-and-by, as she stood near the piano watching a rosy ray from the sunset light up the forehead of Psyche, "you said that you knew my-my-what shall I say! vocation's the cant, is it not? a while ago. Very well. Retain your knowledge. It's not mine unless I find it myself. If I've not enough blind instinct to roll into my own orbit, it's God's fault, and I want no friendly shove from humanity!" Her only answer was to touch the keys till beneath her fingers a vast chord grew up and wandered away in dropping vines of melody. He turned angrily, the blood shot up his fore "Then I shall !" he replied. He went and sat down before the keys, bowed his head in some invocation, and then lifted his hands fearlessly, as if he could perfectly draw forth their golden hoard. But the soul within them was silent, the voice that he questioned was mute, masses of sound groaned disorderedly beneath his touch. Melicent, listening, became as one lost, his dream overshadowed her, all the universe seemed to lose its law and the world to be in harmony with these strange phases that followed one another in endless succession like the waves of mid-ocean lashed by storm, and never melting to any perfect whole. Then a great clang resounded. "And that is not it either!" cried Ambrose, rising. Sing to me, little honey." And Melicent sang. It was just a thin, clear voice, fit for lullabies, delicate and low, singing a luscious little Italian night 66 song-much such a humming strain as a bee might croon over his cells of scented sweet with a blossom standing sentry at the door. But it was a shore to the tossing unrest in his mind, it broke there and subsided, and merged into gently swaying sleep. here and there a pine feathered off into the air, and gave such a depth of shadow to the brilliant lights of elm and birch, those jocund birches, frolicking and rollicking from sun till shadow, so glad to have broken into the summer, tittering and twittering, and set off by every slightest breeze into a fresh flutter with new hoards of gamesome secrets to whisper away-a man would need dye his conscience in blackest hellebore before he could be sad beneath them. Here all "Always sing to me such songs, dear little girl," he said. "I believe you are my guardian angel cheated of your wings and your primal memories. At least you are God's bird of dawn, singing on a rose-tree spray under the morning-day long there was whistling and trilling above: star. Good-night." He staid to strike a light. the partridge whirred beside the path, the rabbit "What is this little thing, this thought, on my darted across it, and now and then in an open lips, that comes and still will come?" he mur- space they could see a young eagle slowly wheel mured. And taking up the light he went out, and sail away again. A great white orchis singing in an under-tone as he went, sweetened all damp places, ferns tufted the interstices and tossed like plumes of tournament, and the moss of ages, velvet soft and freshly verdurous, draped rock and mound with cushioned ease. Now and then a break in the woods opened on wide meadow scenes where all color lay diffused in vaguest dreams-here the waving whitening rice-plain, there strained with rusty reds and deepening purples, and every where shifting the disguises with each cloud that swept a shadow across them. Beyond, on one side rose dun hills, on the other slumbered the sea. "Purple shadows, darkly dreaming, On a distant grave." "Now he's got a new kink!" exclaimed Grandpa Aubichon, who could bear nothing of this sort in his neighborhood, and had been in visible torment for the last hour. "Now he'll go plunging off to Germany to bury himself in uncouth sounds, or go up in a fiery chariot from some peak of the Apennines!" "That is to say, a balloon. A polite way for naughty Grandpa Aubichon to call people—” "A bag of wind ?" If "No; he won't go, he'll stay with you." "Well. But you mustn't any longer. you're a little bird of dawn you must go to sleep before it's time to get up. I wish we had something to keep the poor fellow from moping to death with ennui, though." "If we only had Flora!" "I'll tell you what, honey. To-morrow I must go to Babylon-it's a meeting of the Kill or Cure Society—and I'll see a friend or two and make some inquiries, and you have a letter ready, and we'll find her if she's in the land of the living." Here in the dry, warm, sun-soaked moss lay Ambrose; and Melicent, throned on the low boughs, talked to him in a little monotone that she meant should give him rest, but which had the art of keeping his attention perpetually on the alert to catch the next inflection, it was so in tune with the rustle of the leaves, the murmur of the wind seemed to slide through it, and the faint hum of the forest wings; and as he listened, he watched-watched the fair face so pure of the world's breath, telling of lonely life and deep self-intimacy in its freedom from all outer impress. In the hours when she read to him, or when she sung quaint ballads, he fancied that "Dear old Grandpa Aubichon! What would he must have already died, and be lying now on the world be without you?" the outskirts of heaven with some sweet saint to "I hope your world won't be without me for tend him. Nothing jarred with the dreamy state a good while yet, honey sweet." in which her presence wrapped him, other than "Dear Grandpa, you know you're so hale and thus her individuality never appeared: she bestrong," she said, nestling her face in his shin-came the incarnate shadow of his mood, whating curls, "and I'm so-so not hale and strong -don't you suppose I can contrive to die when you do?" "I suppose you'll die now if you don't go to bed; holding your eyes open with both hands! There, go to! Kiss me pleasant dreams and scamper!" Grandpa Aubichon being gone the next week and the next, what was to hinder their taking themselves to the wilderness?-for a continuation of the garden stretched away into a great deciduous forest known by that title through all the country round. There was something very inspiriting and gay in the edges of these woods -the sunshine came filtering through the emerald roof with such a golden strain, the color of the sky cut itself with such a jewel-like transparence against the sharp angle of the oak-leaves, ever that mood might be. At length, when little remained of the past on which to speak, and they had not found that unreserve which opens the heart of to-day, however they might approach it with trembling divining rods, Melicent brought to light a cluster of those strange romances where in each one some man has garnered the whole poetry and reverie of his life, and so given his all to the world, embalmed his soul and died—and in such spheres, foreign and deeply delicious, they spent the long summer days. The ideal surrounded them and blended indefinably with daily things-the light was softer, the perfume deeper, the delight immortal. Each borrowed for the other the investments of the scene: they charmed and soothed as those of whom they read charmed and soothed: the one became grand and heroic with a hidden pathos in his life, the other more tenderly beautiful and holy. Love 48 already shook his wings about them, and shed strange hints upon the air. Wandering home in the late afternoons they repeated to each other, till they timed their steps, such clinging verses as had nestled immemorially in their hearts. Sometimes so the day broke up in splendor; sometimes an east wind, rathe and rasping though so low, crept in and brushed the fogs before it; cold, treacherous vapors that, white and fleece-like, trailed all about them and overlay the branches like low-hung clouds; and after one such stroll Mr. Ambrose sought the wilderness no more. He was ill now, prostrate and pale, but not suffering, for Melicent seemed to spell all pain away, to prevent it, to destroy it; but when Grandpa Aubichon returned, he saw that the enemy had made long strides and fortified his intrenchments "You're "Come, come, honey!" he cried. helping this man imagine himself in extremis. Hurry about, shuffle a little, make a noise!" "Noise!" said Mr. Ambrose, rising on one hand from his lounge. "Why don't you ask one of the little cherubs-head and wings-in the Prayer-Book corners to make a noise ?" "They generally are doing their silent best with a penny trumpet." "Noise from a sunrise cloud in the house, a balmy breath-” "And will she succeed?" asked Melicent, sparkling. "She has extraordinary talent." "I always knew there was something-dear old Flor-but I never thought of that. Opera, And did you get down on your of course. knees, Grandpa Aubichon, and beg her to come here?" "I left an urgent message to the effect that this was her home: in case she fails, you know." "But she won't fail!" Here Grandpa Aubichon plunged into a heap of accumulated letters, and Mr. Ambrose sauntering to the casement, at length stepped through it, drawn by certain deep-honeyed scents beyond, and then down the walks and out into the warm rich sunset. When, half an hour later, he turned the angle of the house, the picture of Melicent, as she sat half-way up the old wooden staircase, now as before covered with the honeysuckles' rich and satisfying atmosphere of sweetness, struck him not so much as a picture as like the reflection of himself in a glass. He was only watching the ruddy tinge of the west cast back and painted on the tender east, and he mounted and sat beside her. "You look quite well," she said, gayly. "I am quite well. I was before. Only one needs a point to pronounce the fact for one, and How sweet "In fact, a medicated vapor," laughed Meli- that was Dr. Aubichon's return. cent. "You'll the air, how lovely the hour!" he murmured, "Don't you suppose the gods tire of them know. But here Grandpa Aubichon bustled round himself to change the aspect of things; in the first place emptying a basket of blossoms in a rosy rain over both Melicent and Ambrose, then winding up the old music-box till it struck to the tune of Alaster M'Alaster, and finally loop-selves and have dreadful yawns ?" ing back the curtains, throwing wide the shutA ters, and flooding the place with lustre. long yellow beam touched Melicent: as Ambrose watched it strike and spread about her, its effect was for him like that of the writing on the wall, and then in its heat and power all the secret writing of these swift days started into light. From their warm drifting dream he was awake. He seemed to hold his heart in his hand-ah, how noble, should his grasp close and he carry this new fact with him, like a slumbering angel of resurrection, into his tomb! Ah, how selfish, should he weld that young life with his own He fell back in the forge of a life-long sorrow! faint and blind, roused by the airy sprinkle of perfume from that little hand above him. Ah, how sweet to lapse along this sunny tide, and so "No; they have laughter never spent,' you Nothing so blissful as a god's nature The sun would sooner cease shining." Here a pause, into which the stars stole trembling, and soft darkness crept up to woo the fragrance. sink into the great sea! 66 66 'Strange!" he exclaimed, at length. "When I came I was so indifferent to death; and now, in thinking of it, I seem to look out of these clasping sunbeams into a cold, black, and horrible gap." 66 Why, Mr. Ambrose, then you do not love God!" "No, Miss Melicent, I love you!" If some wand of transformation had stricken her the blow would not have startled more. She had schooled herself never to hope for it, to dream of it, fancy it; and at the sound wide She had known calm, I have found Flora," said valves folded back and the lustre of a new world smote her in the face. Grandpa Aubichon at tea. and here was turbulence: into her soft demimonde broke flerce lights and shades. An emotion that should have been joy and was yet like fear made her soul tremulous within her. Previously love had permeated all her substance; The winds the love that is sacrifice-should she receive into her soul the love that is divine? "Found Flora!" "I can't wait to suppose, dear Grandpa Aubi- "Studying for the stage! And has a wonderful engagement in prospect." Ambrose's lip curled in a silence of satirical seemed to breathe about her with fervor as she leaned toward his waiting arms; the stars to scorn. throb in silver chorals; the very blossoms to burst their innermost cells and diffuse around her a fresh and sacred meaning: her eyes anointed read the secret of creation. And he who had caused this commotion, who had laid such a hand on her heart-strings, and was arousing a vibration never to cease, attended her will with assured quiet. Words had escaped him which he had meant to seal in silence forever, and now he must bear their weight. "And yet, Melicent," said he, "it is hope that makes the horror. Death will be as idle a word as before if you say that you do not care for me." "But you know I do, Mr. Ambrose." wider; each day unfolded a rarer petal; and they wandered in fresh labyrinths of sweetness. With Melicent youth was at flood. But for this season she would have glided through a life of soft neutral tints; now her emotions broke in flashes of vivid color. So new and so precious was her delight, that certainty of possession was in perpetual ebb and flow. With her all was riot; with Ambrose all was calm. Over his dark eyes and keen features there grew the refinement of peace. Yet you would never have known her joyous trouble except for the changing flush low on the cheeks-for the sparkle kindling and quenching in the irids. The old repose and gentle calm hovered round about her manner yet. And all the time Grandpa Aubichon went and came, like a beneficent Jove, drowning care in the splendid skies that July had folded about the earth, and happier than Jemschid's jeweler could have been, because he had a love-affair upon his hands. But yet there was a thorn beneath the rose. If she had failed to feel the sting when she grasped it first, the pain throbbed there now, for in the very words wherein he told his love he had denied a larger love. Daring and yet distrustful, she waited, knowing that, while this love ripened in all its suns and breezes, that must needs be born-not There was but little to say: the tide rises knowing that in her life alone he was daily lifthigher than words over full-freighted moments.ed A murmured endearment, a touch, a caress; the love was so profound, the bliss so still. They sat, tenderly tranquil, and suffered the night to deepen around them. All nature seemed to conspire, wishing to soothe and to satisfy, sending its hushed influences to reassure them there sequestered in the gloom and fragrance. And as Ambrose, with closed eyes, felt her breath on his cheek, and her head bowed above him in the broad-burdened hour, and under the solemn midnight depths, he could have imagined that they floated out, up-buoyed, on some sweet sea that was to strand them only on the shores of another world. Ah! to be so drawn into those arms; to be wrapped away in that heart; to cease standing without the walls of heaven; to enter with the worship, and become lost in the god! Soul sealed with soul, one life, one death, one eternity. No longer apart from him, but, come what fate might, his very self. As Melicent clung to her lover in the first timid flush of joyful trust she believed herself blessed among women: so gladly she assumed her destiny-the destiny of all her kind-the cross, the crown of thorns, the everlasting rapture. But a voice broke through the quiet lapse: Grandpa Aubichon summoned them in, as he woke suddenly to the fact of their absence and of the fallen dew; and they parted there, under the stars, in that first separation, pointed as Ithuriel's spear, the test of true and false, and after which each fears to look at the other lest they have only dreamed. How sunnily the days slipped by-the weeks how swiftly-brimmed with happiness, yet calm as pastorals! Pain nor grief rose before them; death was carried captive. Life became to Melicent a summer idyl. Her sensation was so involved with the complete joy of these days that, whatever disaster or despair might overtake her, her whole nature would be sealed and stamped with their impress, her temperament infiltrated with their effluence, and she could not but take even sorrow kindly. And as for him, the fact that he was capable of such experience, could so inspire, could so receive, alone insured his soul's salvation. Still the rose opened wider and to a higher plane. The days when Ambrose made delicious drowse all the noon in scented hay-ricks, lolling home from the fields at length on the cloudcushioned loads-those days were all over; the berries, too, dark and shining, as clusters of midnight dew should be, were left for the birds to peck up on the high hill-pastures, and he heaped himself no more with sheaves of the aromatic fern, but chose instead the broadest sunbeam of the garden, and steeped himself in it with most oblivious idlesse. To-day a shimmering August rain was falling every where, and to dispel the musty dampness of the rooms Melicent went about sprinkling rose-water till the air was sweet as that of some Oriental palace-court. The fine showers came sifting half through sun and half through cloud, till it seemed as if a hoar-frost were sheeting its jeweled net-work round the windows, and every once in a while a ravishing rainbow started up from nowhere, and as suddenly melted again into the murk weather. "I always said there was enchantment here," said Ambrose, pointing at the rain. "Here we are sealed away from the world in our crystal walls; and these are the last letters Thomas will ever bring you!" Melicent rose to take them, and sat down again at his feet. "That's for Grandpa Aubichon," she said; "and that, and that; here are the Sodom and Gomorrah papers; that's for you; here's mine. Dear old Flor! don't it look as if she wrote with a sunbeam?" "Well, honey," said Grandpa Aubichon, entering with his pipe in his fingers, "what news?" 50 Then let us slip into another." • When ?" "Oh, after harvest." "That will be too late," murmured Melicent, reminded of what she endeavored to forget and "The frosts are deadly." refused to believe. "Nonsense! It will do him good to see the sunny half of an October peach." and pain. I have no right to take advantage "Then you mistrust me, Melicent!" 66 'Is it mistrust? No, it is love, it is love!" she whispered. So Summer stripped off her glory and was away over the seas, where shortly Grandpa Aubichon and the others found her. Having ascertained that the residence of a man whom he had known in the days when he followed the sea was yet in existence, though vacant, thither Grandpa Aubichon transported a household. This man had been a descendant of the old buccaneers, and with the instinct of race had fixed his home in a very solitude of sea. from the highways of the ocean, it leafed and fruited unsuspected through its ages; approached by nothing but shallop or corral, an islet less than half a mile in extent, cousin to the Cayman-braque and those myriad others Aside "Ah yes, Grandpa Aubichon, one word for him, and how many for somebody else? You have seen the sunny half of sixty October peach-pearls threaded with most melodious names-far es, take a citron or a papaw this year." too insignificant for charts. They reached it in boats; and leaving behind them the blue mountains of Jamaica, it seemed at first, lying so low in its shoals, the merest vapor steaming forever "Little tyrant! See what it is to have no liberties, Ambrose. Well, then, let us sail in October. Those my letters, honey?" "Shall you like it ?" asked Melicent of Am- from the surface of the shining sea; and then brose. "Of course I shall. Simmering over the sea, resting there under giant plumes of luxuriant leaf beside the plain of everlasting azure-so dreamy, so lazy, as it breaks inshore, but far I should like out creaming on the coral reefs. Let me down to be buried in the sea, Melicent. into the deep of that inverted heaven that I may feel its great heaving heart and share its infinity." She threw her arms forward and around him, caressing through impetuous tears, striving to speak, but stifled with sobs, and assuaging the sudden anguish with kiss after kiss scattered on his lips. with nearer view, as its one granite needle and its gigantic group of palms and mangos sketched themselves against the light, a fleet of masts floating up the horizon; and suddenly, with one of the fantastic sea-transformations, they found themselves slipping along the shore through waters darkly transparent under the lofty shadow of its arching grove. Long forgotten by its central fire-fountains, the isle yet dimly preserved their trace, and, crater-like, its heart dipped between the shore and the precipitous south shaft On this rocky shaft into a gentle hollow, where all soft airs and medicinal balms collected. the winds that came across the sea, full freight"Hush, hush, little love!" he said, partly ris-ed from their far flight over ranker regions of ing. "It was only a fancy. Don't cry; forget to think. Perhaps we shall never die, who knows?" And so he soothed the aching heart, and won the fair face back to its old guise, half peace, half melancholy, the parted lips yet trembling with the returning thought, the eyes yet gleaming through suspended tears. "Don't let them fall," he said, lightly. "Keep "Till you go? But I am going too." "I may be too ill to have any but the near- "Mr. Ambrose," replied Melicent, simply, unbounded forest-wildernesses where tropic odors brooded-dropped half their rich lading in precious dew, that whether it dripped from spine to spine of the great cactus blooms that starred the topmost crevices in crimson and in snow, or wafted thence on breezes of balsam, seemed yet to breathe round the place an inviolate wall that shut it from the salt sea in an isolation of perfume as our atmosphere shuts us in from space. Nestled in this island valley, and ringed with the giant feathery ferns, they seemed to be below the level of the waters that emblazoned themselves above in one edge of deepest tint, like the rim of a drinking-cup embossed in a wrought-work of sapphires, and out of which the sky foamed forever in a golden luxury of light. Half-way up the great rock a fountain burst into the air, and leaping along under domes of spray and rainbow, it tore swift passage down the shaft and disappeared in a fissure again, whence conducted through some dark passage, it fell on the other side into the sea; but its impetuous wings fanned into life great currents that swept away all impurity, and the |