court, and while he was looking he might be doing something with the camera.

It was hot, very hot, when he left the shade of Aunt Leila's garden and set foot on the dusty road, and something in the heat and the dust brought back to mind prim little perspiring Aurora as she had looked that Sunday afternoon, in her stiffly starched white dress and vivid pink bows. He had almost, if not altogether, forgotten Aurora of late.

Now, as the recollection of her flashed over him, it was not unpleasant to contemplate the effect of his great stature, his threatening mustache, his bull-dog pipe, his bicycle, his guitar, his camera, his tennis set and "Sportsman's Standard" on the gawky country girl. Garrett quite liked the idea of her surprise and awe. Perhaps he would take her picture, he promised himself, recalling sundry novels he had read in lazy hammocks on summer days, of artists who went sketching and painting in rural parts and stirred up "tumult of emotions" in the breasts of their nut-brown models. With all his holy zeal for books, Garrett was at the age when stirring up a tumult of emotions in the breast of anything young and feminine was no ill-favored thought.

Accordingly, he faced him in the direction of Aurora's home, and the two miles thereto seemed but a stride, so lightly buoyant were the thoughts of conquest that carried him along. How surprised she would be to see him! She would remember him, of course! Doubtless, it being early in the morning, she would be unprepared for company-more than probably confused at being caught about her homely tasks. But he would reassure her, Garrett promised himself. He would tell her how picturesque the peasant women of Europe were in their field dress, how infinitely preferable to the artist eye, to the modish women of the cities. (Garrett had just read this in a monthly magazine.) Ought he to knock at the seldom-used front door, and give her time to "primp" ere she came to open? Or should he walk 'round to the side or back and surprise her? Politeness dictated the former course; dramatic instinct the latter, and dramatic instinct won.

To the side door, therefore, Garrett proceeded, and if anything one-half so

splendid had ever been at Aurora's side door before Garrett knew little about the probabilities in a one-horse country town.

Before he had rounded the corner of the house the pungent smell of suds smote his nostrils. Aurora was washing! A jutting angle of the house hid the side door from view until one was quite upon it, and there, on a sort of platform made by the widening of the board walk, a lusty country girl stood rubbing coarse clothes with hands that looked capable of felling an Garrett gave a gasp of surprise, but the keeping of "hired help" in these parts was, he knew, exceptional; therefore the young lady of the house this must be.

OX.

Lifting his cap with a courtly deference, he inquired if he had the honor of addressing Miss Aurora Russell.

"La!" said the lady addressed, and after an interval of frank examination," No; she ain't to hum."

"She still lives here, does she?" Garrett inquired, replacing his cap.

Yes, she lived there, but had gone out nearly an hour ago. No, the lady addressed could not say where she might be.

Thanking her, Garrett took his way down the plank walk, past the well and the barn, in the direction of the south meadow. Back of the house was the orchard, a scraggly little patch of poor-pedigreed apples and "picklin' pears," which never grew luscious and golden. In spite of its poverty, however, it was June-beautiful to-day, but Aurora was not there.

She was by the brook-side, in the south meadow, book in hand, and her book was Jean Ingelow's poems, bound in red.

Although she had a book in her hand Aurora was not reading—that is, not until she became aware, out of the corner of her eye, of an unwontedly nobby figure striding down in her direction from the orchard. Then her absorption in the poetess became prodigious; not even the shadow that fell across her book roused her until a gentle "Ahem!" made her start as if stung. She looked up, 'way up, and Garrett grinned. "I guess you don't know me," he said. Aurora looked puzzled for a moment.

"Why, it's Garrett Levering!" she exclaimed, as if she could hardly believe her

senses.

Yes, he assured her, it was Garrett, and if he was not mistaken, she was Aurora

Russell who had once given him a lesson in fishing for trout. Having said so much Garrett was at a loss for a few seconds for further speech; he had forgotten to calculate on the girl's being pretty!

Aurora was better prepared; she had pictured him so much, and so idealizingly, that it would scarcely have surprised her to find his head three feet further into the clouds than it was, or his distinguished bearing three times augmented (if that could have been possible). Also Aurora had her due complement of feminine finesse. Garrett had come here to find her, had found her, and was no more able to dissimulate the fact than any man of eighteen, or twice eighteen. Aurora had come here to be found, had realized her expectations, but was woman-child enough to appear dumfounded by the unheralded apparition. And as guile is readier of tongue than simple honesty, Aurora advanced to command of the situation long before Garrett's frankly astonished gaze had done wandering from point to point of her, as if in pursuit of some least suggestion of the girl of six years agone.

It was not (although Garrett did not know this) that the girl was so pretty, but that she appealed so strongly to the imagination which is a much more dangerous quality, of course, than any amount of mere prettiness. There was something in the unconscious grace of her supple young body that thrilled one like the swaying of tall grasses, and there was an unforgettable look in the serious brown eyes, a look that might record or portend almost anything. Garrett was more bewildered than merely admiring, and while he pondered, awkwardly and obviously, Aurora plied him with questions as to when he had come, how long he was to stay, and the like, just as if she had not been informing herself on these points by interrogating his uncle's family for an interminable fortnight.

When he found his sober senses somewhat, he inquired of Aurora politely what she was reading. Told it was poetry, he inquired whose. Told it was Jean Ingelow's, he inquired if Aurora liked it. Told that she did, he made request that she read him some passages, and then threw himself down alongside her as the painters in the novels always did by their nut-brown heroines.

Aurora considered HER poem for a brief moment, then turned shyly toward the back of the volume, as far away from it as possible, and read sedately "Seven Times," conscientiously through, from seven times one to seven times seven.

Sympathy lent modulation to her clear young voice, and Garrett, listening, caught far less of Miss Ingelow's intent than of the more salient fact that the girl who read was a poetry-lover-a kindred soul, in other words.

One poem from the book sufficed, for when the heart beats young it has recourse to poetry only to stimulate itself; old hearts read to forget-young hearts read to be reminded that the world is theirs.

Talking of poetry, Garrett asked Aurora if she liked Shelley-that dear idol of youth-and Aurora pleading ignorance of his poems, Garrett recited to her snatches of "The Skylark," "The Cloud," "To Jane with a Guitar," "Constantia Singing," and "The Sensitive Plant." Aurora's face flushed with delight in their beauty, but the poems that moved her to her young soul's depth, Garrett soon learned, were poems like "Evangeline," "Enoch Arden," and the Idylls of the King. Her perception of beauty was good, considering that it had been so wholly uneducated; but passionate appreciation of the human drama requires no preparation save a nature tuned to sympathy. In her starved little life Aurora had not turned, as so many lonely souls do, to Nature for companionship, but had sat through the procession of the years-bud and blossom and fruit and seed, requiem and resurrection, bird-song and soughing wind-indifferent to the drama of earth and wistful to be close to the human drama; unregardful, of course, of the human drama as it played itself at Overbrook-but that was to be expected of her youth.

From Shelley and her confession of fealty to Longfellow and Tennyson, it seemed but a step, to Garrett, to the declaration of his own poetic purposes, a confidential murmur of some of his achievements, even.

Aurora was entranced, though the poems recited to her by their author were so crammed with mythological allusions that she could scarcely catch their meaning.

It was high noon ere it seemed to the young people by the brook that they had

fairly exchanged civilities, and Garrett, getting up to go, remembered his camera, and posed slim, sweet Aurora for a snapshot." They made no tryst for further meetings, but each knew, as if the words had been spoken, that the little brook would witness many.

At dinner, Uncle Amos inquiring if he had spent a pleasant morning, Garrett replied that he had, and went so much further as to add that he had been looking for a good, level place to set up his tennis. "And while I was looking, I stumbled on that little Aurora Russell I used to play with years ago when I was here."

"She's a real nice little thing," said his aunt," but I mistrust how she's goin' to turn out-the way her father brings her up."

On Garrett's inquiry what that way might be, practical, hard-working Aunt Leila shook her head ominously.

"You know her ma was a school-teacher," she began, "and had a lot of highfalutin notions. Not that poetry and all that ain't all right for them that have time for it, but you can't run a farm and moon over poetry books at the same time; and 'Rory's ma wa'nt never no helpmeet to her pa; it's kind of a good thing she died, poor body, though it does seem hard to say it. Now this little gal's got her ma's ways all over, and her pa, Jake Russell, is that soft over the child, and that foolish about thinkin' mebbe farm life was too hard for her ma and wore her out before her time, that he don't make 'Rory do a thing; hires help to keep the house, and lets that young thing do as she pleases. Now what way is that to bring up a poor farm girl, I'd like to know?"

Garrett made no reply, but toward three o'clock he remarked that he believed he would take a book "out somewhere" and "study," and, Shelley in hand, took the direction of the brook, where he found Aurora, without a book this time, her slim brown hands clasped about her updrawn knees and a wondrous look of eager expectancy on her sweet young face.

Intimacy becomes a thing of moments under such conditions. Inside three days Aurora had confided to Garrett the story of THE poem, and her belief that the brook symbolized parting such as theirs of six years before, with the fluttering of letters first, then silence.

"But now I have you back again,” said the little maid, naïvely. She made no secret of her joy in him.

And within a week Garrett had written three poems to her, had photographed her daily, and had made her the repository of all his dreams touching a poetic career.

And so the summer waxed to its zenith. Billy, the collie, was adopted into the concern, the guitar was kept strung for the playing of plaintive little melodies out under the trees on warm, moonlit July nights, the "Sportsman's Standard" came into use because, while one may not talk and catch trout, one may talk and fish for them; and moreover, in circumstances like these one may be very still and yet very happy.

In August the inevitable happened: they had a quarrel. Like most serious quarrels, it began in some absolutely unimportant trifle. They had agreed to meet by the brook on an August afternoon at three o'clock. It was a day of sullen heat; overhead a brazen sky, underfoot a baked, dry earth. At noon Aurora's father came in from the fields exhausted, seeing through a red mist and dizzy unto nausea.

To Aurora, who came to him in alarm, he said there was nothing to worry about, only on no account must she venture out of the house before sundown. Aurora had been an indulged child, but she had never learned disobedience therefrom, and three o'clock came and went and she kept no tryst by the brook.

The sun was no sooner down, however, than she sped to the meeting place, hopeful that Garrett might have been detained at home by his uncle's counsel, and perchance be at the brook now. But he wasn't, nor was he there next morning, nor that afternoon, and poor little Aurora's heart grew sicker and sicker as the hours dragged by and he did not come.

Perhaps he had been sunstruck, was her agonized thought. But a moment's reflection showed her that if anything had happened to Garrett the fact would have been neighborhood news long ere this.

Another day and another went by, and the girl went faithfully to the brook twice each day and waited and waited, going home each time to throw herself on her bed and cry, until a whole week went by and the misery in her face smote even her unobservant father with alarm.

Meanwhile, over at the Levering farm a haughty boy nursed a grievance. It had been hot that afternoon, certainly! Who knew it better than he, who had toiled two miles in the blistering mid-afternoon sun to keep his tryst? She had but a few steps to come, down through the shady orchard, and yet she had kept him there waiting a whole hour and a half of oven heat, augmented by his impatience to read to her a sonnet he had composed to her that morning. He considered it the finest thing he had ever done in a poetic way; using a poet's license to cover the anachronism, he acclaimed Aurora as her

Whose name the Dawn hath borrowed to express Acme of dewy freshness.

Hot, hurt, and very angry, Garrett returned home. His first impulse, to destroy the sonnet, was succeeded by the sober second thought that a fine poem was worth all the girls in existence. Suppose Keats had torn things up when Fanny Brawne irritated him! Perish the thought! But no, it was not such a bad thought after all, for did it not lead to the reflection how poets in all times have suffered at the caprice of vain, silly women, and thus, "cradled into poetry by wrong," have learned “in suffering what they teach in song."

This enduring indignities in great company kept Garrett interested and busy, poetically busy, for a week, at the end of which time he was confronted with an old, old need-the need of some one to read his passionate verses to.

He considered Aunt Leila for the honor, but recalled what she thought of poetry for all but the strictly leisure class; he thought of Uncle Amos, but knew him to be out of the question. Finally he thought of Aurora! To tell the truth, the idea of what posterity might think of his heartbroken verses did not move him to half the curiosity he felt to know what she would think of them, whose light caprice had called them into being.

After eight interminable days, therefore, he repaired to the brook, and there, as he had confidently expected, he found Aurora, pale and red-eyed, and so very, very humble that he forgave her at once, though he had not meant to. Also, when she cried he kissed her, which he had not

meant to do either, and which, when it was done, so surprised and confused them both that they sat silent for a long while.

Presently Garrett noticed that Aurora had a book in her lap, the red-bound book of Jean Ingelow's poems she had had when he found her here in June, and on his speaking of it, Aurora opened up her heart about her poem.

"I never could understand it," she said, the tears shining in her brown eyes, "but now I do. It was a misunderstanding-a little, little thing at first, but neither of them would 'cross over' until it had grown so big they couldn't, and it was too late."

III

AFTER Garrett left that summer a divine discontent stirred the spirit of Aurora. He had confided to her how little likely his people were to appreciate his determination to be a poet, and there came a noble dignity into his bearing when he spoke of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that he expected to suffer in his ardent spirit, and the path of anguish that would doubtless be his path to fame.

"You must be my Mary Shelley, Aurora," he had told her. And with eyes very round with awe and sympathy Aurora promised that she would.

"Pa," she said to Jake Russell, the day after Garrett left, "I want to go to school." "Why, 'Rory," was his surprised comment, "I thought y'd been through the

school!"

"Oh, that school!" retorted Aurora contemptuously, "that's nothing! I mean to a real school where you get education. I want to go to a young ladies' seminary, pa, and learn about gods and goddessess and something called mythology."

"Well, now, 'Rory, I dunno but ye kin," said Jake Russell; "where'd y' like to go?"

And Aurora never knew what that drawling assent cost the man threatened with the renewal of an old tragedy.

To a young ladies' seminary in Elmira, therefore, Aurora went, and if the teachers wondered at her avidity for Latin verbs and Greek fables, it was because they did not know of a boy in his freshman year at a great New England college-a boy who wrote odes and elegiacs so full of classical

allusions that it required the most downright "plugging" to interpret them.

It was their plan that Garrett should spend all his college vacations at Overbrook, but it is easier to plan, God knows, than to execute! One summer he had to spend tutoring in mathematics, and another summer he went camping in Canada with three fellows of his class; and the summer of his graduation, when he had promised her that nothing should keep him from spending with her his last real, long vacation before going to work, his father died, and it was out of the question that he desert his mother in the poignancy of her fresh grief, to idle away the sad, bright days in the companionship he longed for at Overbrook.

So, of all the time they had planned to spend together, there was only one summer when he could be with her; but it was enough to blow into a lively flame a sentiment that, in Garrett's case, letters had not kept from dwindling to a mere glow.

It was that summer they became engaged. When Aurora went back to school for her third and last year, there came to her from New York a slender wire of gold, and hanging from it a "bangle" in the shape of a heart set with tiny turquoises.

She used to fear, sometimes, as she looked at the little ring, lest Garrett in his so-different life be weaned away from her; but she might have spared herself (poor anxious little maid!) the tears of terror this thought occasioned. She was afraid of the "stylish girls" of his strange world, but she needn't have been! There was not one in all Garrett's acquaintance who had a tithe of Aurora's reverence. She was all compounded of a great wistfulness and a sympathy that was half brooding, wholly worshipful. Other girls exacted; Aurora paid tribute. And Garrett was a budding poet-so Aurora had no rival.

Jake Russell went to Elmira to see his daughter graduate, and when they were riding home to Overbrook, her school life behind her, he asked her, fondly, what she was going to do now with all her learning. And Aurora looked up into his face with the serene look of one who has never been gainsaid, and replied:

"I'm going to marry Garrett as soon as he gets a start in his career. It was so I could help him that I studied so hard."

Jake Russell was not surprised—at least not greatly. He had expected as much, and nerved himself for it.

"What is his career?" he asked Aurora, politely.

"Poetry," Aurora answered fervently. Jake Russell had never heard of Ibsen, else he might have bowed his head upon his hands and whispered "Ghosts!" Instead, after some seconds of silence, he laid a rough brown hand on Aurora's slim white. one, and crushed it in an eloquent pressure. "I hope you'll be almighty happy, little gal," was all he said.

Aurora never knew what her father suffered with her and for her in those two summers when Garrett could not come, and she strove so bravely to hide her intolerable loneliness.

After his graduation Garrett went to work in earnest-not in a dilettante way, as he might have but for the altered family circumstances consequent on his father's death, but as a man works who must not only make his mark, but his daily bread.

Naturally, the beckoning of the Muse and the dull demands of bread-winning were not always, nor often, in the same direction, and Garrett suffered no little bitterness thereby. His letters to Aurora were full of an impassioned sense of the complete, fundamental wrongness of things, and Aurora, who cared so little about the material as to be almost abnormal, yearned to share with her poor poet his attic and crust (which were fairly figurative, however), but deferred to Garrett's assurance that it would be impossible.

She taught the country school at Overbrook in those days of waiting, and really strove, as best she could, to do it more than perfunctorily-remembering the husks fed to her childish spirit here in the days that seemed so long ago.

But with her whole soul she longed for him-for the sound of his voice, the touches of his hands, the thrill of his presence. There were times when her great wistfulness for him was almost more than she could bear, and she would creep out to the south meadow and sit in the shade of the bushes by the brookside and shut her eyes tight and try to imagine him beside her. And when the effort failed her, as it was bound to (poor child!), she would lay her head on the grass and cry-silently, not bitterly nor rebelliously, but with a piteous loneliness.