hatred. It only lasted for a moment, you know. I am an American myself now, and I love Dick's people." Dolores's words made a great impression on Grey, and he was thinking of them that evening while he sat alone under the arching corridor. The night was exquisite. A round, golden moon flooded the world with light. The warm air was full of the rich perfume of growing violets. Down in the valley the course of the river was outlined by a filmy blue haze overhanging it. The silence of the night was broken only by the soft splash of the fountain in the court; occasionally a lonesome owl hooted plaintively in the oak trees on the hill. Suddenly Grey became aware that Dolores was near him. He had not heard her come out, and for a moment he looked at her without speaking. She wore a yellow satin gown—a deep orange yellow, that no one but a Spanish woman would have dared to wear. On her neck and in her hair gleamed the Mexican opals that had been famous throughout Southern California when Doña Ysabel, Santa Marina's beautiful bride, led the dance at balls and fiestas in the neighborhood of Casarosa. "If only you had a mantilla and a gleaming dagger," Grey said at last, “you would be the typical Spanish beauty. Are you posing for a picture?" "I was only thinking what a perfect night it is," she answered, "and what a shame it would be to break the silence by speaking." "I have been sitting here for half an hour, wishing that-" (Grey stopped for a moment)" wondering how people could waste such a night indoors." "It is so beautiful," she murmured, stretching out one hand as if to feel the softness of the air. "It makes one realize the greatness of " She laughed lightly and drew a chair out into the full glory of the moonlight. "I was almost serious," she said, picking up a guitar and striking soft, sweet chords. "It must have been the moonlight. I wonder if that is its usual effect." "To make one serious?" Grey asked. "Moonlight is most depressing, I think. On a night like this all life seems vague and unsatisfactory. Your ideas are all illusive. You can only realize how sweet life might be and how bitter the reality is. The things you love seem near, almost within your grasp, and you stretch out your hand to take them and find them separated from you by an infinity of space or some shadowy, invisible barrier." Dolores's fingers wandered lightly over the strings of the guitar; her eyes were fixed on the hills across the valley. Before you came out," Grey continued, "I was wishing that I had lived in the early Spanish days here, that I had been a Franciscan monk, separated from the anguish and pain of life and love by religious vows and that sort of thing; to walk in a cloister like this all the days of one's life and have one's senses and passions numbed by prayers and thoughts of a future life!" Throwing a cushion on the ground near Dolores's feet, he sat down and leaned his head back against one of the pillars where the shadow fell on his face. "Now, I wish that I had lived in the days when men laid down their lives for love, when adoration was expressed in one last act of service, and rewarded perhaps with a glance, a touch of the hand." He watched her for some time. "But if I had lived then I never would have known how sweet life might be, how beautiful, and-how wretched." There was a long silence, and then Dolores began to play a quick rippling accompaniment and to sing a Spanish song, gay and bright in time and measure, but with a plaintive minor cadence running through it, and an unsatisfied, unfinished, questioning ending. There were several verses. After the last she put down the guitar and, stepping out into the garden for a moment, picked a dark-red rose. "Have you read Guenn'?" she asked, coming back to Grey. "Do you remember her song, 'Ah, mon Dieu, que la vie est amere!" " Her voice was soft and caressing. To Grey the sad little refrain seemed an answer to his half-expressed love for her. But the light, careless tone in which she spoke after an instant's silence convinced him that he was mistaken. "I am so sorry that you are all going home to-morrow," she said, turning to go into the house. "It would be quite too "Is n't it a heavenly night, Dick?" she asked, stepping lightly through the low window. "But so unspeakably sad! Don't you think so? “Sad? دو No, sweetheart," Dick answered. "You look tired, little one. I am glad that these people are all going home to-morrow and that we are going away together. By the way, dear, can you go with me to the farm in the morning? Lawson is making some changes in the barn; he wants my advice and I want yours. We can walk over there at nine and be back in time for breakfast at ten. Will you go?" Dolores said she would; but she shivered slightly and moved her hand away from her husband's shoulder. He took the hand and kissed it. All the beauty and joy in the night had gone for Dolores. In coming back to the prosaic, real world, she was conscious only of a dull, heavy fatigue. All The morning was cold and desolate. A white sea-fog had crept in during the night, shutting out the world. The redwood trees were faint dark shadows. nature seemed to have lost its definite outline. Big drops of moisture fell from the wet tiles and trees. Dolores shivered as she walked to the farm with Dick. "How empty and desolate everything seems!" she exclaimed. "I feel as though the world ended right there at that white wall of fog, and that I was quite alone in the middle of it." "Alone?" Dick laughed. to forget that I am here." "O, yes; you. But " "You seem Dolores laughed too, but only for an instant; then she shivered again. "It's horrible, perfectly horrible! I hate this country!" After a moment she said, "I don't mean that, you know, Dick. But you can't realize how dreary this seems to me." Breakfast was gay and merry. Almost as soon as it was over the carriages were at the door to take the guests to the train. Won't you go and lie down for a little while, dear?" Dick put his arm round his wife after the last good-bys had been waved. "We start at three, you know, and you can rest until then. I have had my valises put in your room; you might look and see if everything is in." Dolores was oppressed with a sense of emptiness and desolation. The reaction from a week of incessant excitement and pleasure took instant possession of her, and she turned away from her husband without a word. She saw her guitar in the hall where she had left it the night before and touched the strings lightly with her fingers, then shuddered and pushed the instrument away from her. She went to the door of the nursery where Dolly was going to sleep, but as she put her hand on the door-kneb she turned away impatiently. The traveling-bags were on the floor in her room. Glancing at them, she saw that her husband's pistols were in one of them. Opening a drawer of her dressing-table, she took out a small silver-mounted pistol of her own. "I might as well take this, too," she said, putting it down beside the others. "Dick's are so heavy." She could not rest, and walked impatiently around the room. The sullen, monotonous dripping of the fog was the only sound for a few moments. It made her more nervous, and she drew the heavy curtains close together, trying to shut out the dreariness and melancholy. "Doña Dolores, Doña Dolores," Grey's voice was continually saying in her ears. The red rose she had picked the night before lay on the floor between the dressing-table and the traveling-bags. She knelt down and picked it up. Pressing it to her lips, she murmured, "Red as pas sion, sweet as love"." The little silvermounted pistol was close by her hand. If only Dick had come in then! If only her little American Dolly had called to her! Society was shocked when it heard of the sudden death of Mrs. Richard Bellamy. While packing her bags, preparatory to a hunting-trip, she had accidentally shot herself. Death had been instantaneous. The newspaper accounts were long, though the only impressive fact was that Dolores was dead. Bessie Fairfax sat in her room late in the afternoon of the same day. She was numb with pain and horror. Grey's card was brought to her and she rushed down to see him, thinking that it would be a relief to speak of Dolores. "Why, Miss Bessie, you look quite done up," Grey said in an easy, conversational tone. You are not ill, I hope." Bessie started back. "I? Ill? How can you ask such a thing? Don't you know? Have n't you heard?" "What?" he asked. "O, about pooi Mrs. Bellamy, poor little Doña Dolores! Yes, of course. I forgot that you were her cousin. It was a frightful thing, and so soon after we left, too." Are you sure that-" Bessie interrupted, "Do you think-0, I-I can't even say the thing out loud, but the idea is driving me mad. She had everything on earth that a woman could ask for, and it seems impossible; but I cannot get rid of the idea that perhaps it was not-perhaps she-" Bessie broke down utterly. Burying her face in her hands, she sobbed for a few moments. "I don't understand," Grey said at last. "You can't mean that you think she did it intentionally. Such an idea would be absurd. She could have had absolutely no reason for doing such a thing. No; it all comes from trusting women with things they don't know how to handle. Dick ought to have packed his own pistols. Poor old fellow! It must be hard lines to love a woman like Dolores and then have such a thing as this happen. I hope he won't blame himself in the matter. That would make it even harder to bear." The summer sunshine flooded the court at Casarosa. The perfume of roses floated ough the open windows. On Dolores's face, under the calm and quiet of death, was an expression of passionate longing and questioning. IT BY ROSSITER JOHNSON Some truths may be proclaimed upon the housetop; Still others must be whispered in the ear of a friend. T WAS Sunday evening, and we all sat in the Arbor, where we had been looking at the sunset display. This was one of the two or three days in the season when the sun, seen from exactly that point, appeared to descend upon the tip of the village spire, there to divide, and send one glowing half down either slope. Long after he had sunk beneath the horizon there was a marvelous and indescribable display of fantastic forms and brilliant colors in the west. "Why is it," said Mrs. Trenfield, "that a sunset is always more romantic, more poetical, than a sunrise?" We agreed that it was, but we could not at once answer the question. "It appears to me," said Elacott, after taking thought, "that it is because the sunset, while in physical appearance it may closely resemble the sunrise, has one strong element of poetry which the sunrise lacks." Then he was silent for a moment; but if any of us guessed what was in his mind we did not speak it. "I mean pathos," he continued. "There may be joy in meeting and greeting —there may be surprise there may be triumph-there may be hope and promise; but in any parting there is always something of pathos. This strikes the keynote in the very first line of Gray's 'Elegy'; this is the spirit of all such songs as 'Lochaber no more'; this is why the parting of Hector and Andromache commands more interest than any other scene in the Iliad; this is why stories of the last man, the last banquet, or the last battle, are always interesting; this it is that secures attention for the last lines written by a poet or the last words spoken by a friend; this puts human sympathy into every rehearsal of the days that are no more, whether it is presented in Tennyson's melodious verse or in the commonplace regrets of an oldest inhabitant. 'Good morning!' is cheery; 'Good-night!' is contemplative. The rising sun looks upon materials or opportunities; the setting sun upon completed work or wasted energies. This impresses me so powerfully that frequently when I look out in the morning I feel like a youth, and at evening like an octogenarian." "I think you have established your proposition," said Mrs. Trenfield; “and now perhaps you can tell us why some things appear to be essentially poetic—that is, there is some atmosphere of poetry or romance about themselves or their pictures or their names, in whatever connection they occur while other things that would be classed with them by the naturalist or the historian or the scholar are not essentially poetical. In fact, some of them never can be made to appear poetical at all.” "Give an example," said Elacott. Take the harp and the piano," said she. "There is always an air of poetry about a harp, or the mention of it. A piano is also a harp, only it is inclosed in a box and has mechanism for striking the strings, and it is an elaborate and delicate instrument, and can be made to produce wonderful music. But neither the thing itself nor any mention of it, or allusion to it, is ever poetical. I doubt if Shakespeare himself could have produced a poetical line that should speak of the piano." "Perhaps," I suggested, "the inclosing of the harp in a box, and furnishing it with mechanical attachments, are exactly what has robbed it of its poetical quality." "But has not Holmes written a poem on 'The Opening of the Piano '?" asked Miss Ravaline. "Oh yes," her sister answered, "but has he made it poetical?" "Hardly, I confess," said Miss Ravaline. "Give us another example," said Elacott. "Take the apple and the peach," said Mrs. Trenfield. "The peach is the rarer and more delicate; yet the apple lends itself to poetry very readily, while the peach never can. At least, I remember no instance, and I can not imagine one." "Do you forget Tennyson's lines in Mariana "," said Elacott "The rusted nails fell from the knots That held the peach to the garden wall '?" “I am quite familiar with that poem," said she, "and admire it. But in the lines you quote the poetic element is not furnished by the fruit, but by the item of the rusted and loosened nails, which helps to make up the picture of neglect and desolation. The effect would have been precisely the same if he had written: 'The rusted nails fell from the knots That held the vine to the garden wall.'" "Not precisely," said Elacott. "For by mentioning a specific vine or tree, instead of vine or tree in general, he increases the realism or vividness of the picture. Still, I think you are virtually right about the apple and the peach. I should say the difference here was made by history. The apple dates from the days of Eve and Venus, and all sorts of legendary and literary associations cluster about it. But the peach-though it is said to have been cultivated by the Chinese many centuries agoalways presents itself to our minds as a modern affair, and, not only that, but as a markedly commercial affair. We have become familiar with it as a subject of advertisement and mercantile discussion. We are much less likely, when we see the fruit, to have the generic term 'peach' pass through our mind than Crawford's early,' or 'Oldmixon,' or 'Early York,' or 'Morris White,' or 'Ward's late,' or perhaps even 'Stump the World' for there is a variety of the delicious fruit to which that repulsive title has been given. Do you think that item in the story of Eden would still be poetical if we read that Satan offered Eve a Rhode-Island greening or a Roxbury russet? Or how could the poet manage the judgment of Paris if he were obliged to say that the prize for which the three goddesses were contending was a Pound sweet done in gold?" "So far, so good,” said Mrs. Trenfield. "But I doubt if your analytical powers would be able thus to explain all the instances of the essentially poetic." "Call the roll of them, and let us see," said I. She took a little thought, and then said: "All I can name now are: a bridge, a brd, a tree, a rainbow, a cloud, a ship (not a steamer, but a vessel under sail), and a fireplace." |