"Besides," Columbine continued, after a moment's pause, her glance still downcast, "why shouldn't you stay? Your being here makes no difference to papa; he smokes and grubs after the roots of his ancestral tree the same as ever; and as for me," lifting her eyes with a sudden smile that showed all her dimples, "you know how much you amuse me. You are as good as a continued story, and are alive, too, the last being a good deal in this desert." He returned her smile with effort. His moment of intense feeling had so overpowered him that he felt weak and faint. "How white you are!" she exclaimed, noting the wanness of his face; "you should have had your _bouillon_ long ago. A pretty condition you are in to go roaming off by yourself!" She tripped lightly off towards the house for the forgotten nourishment, and Mr. Tom was left to his reflections. He raised himself, as her graceful figure vanished, then sank back upon his rug with something like a groan. All in an instant the knowledge had come to him that he loved her. He had gone on from day to day conscious only of thinking of his own history, which, bit by bit, he was disinterring from the past, as men bring to light some buried city, and insensibly Columbine had become dear to him before he was aware. He buried his face in his hands in a despair which was in part the result of his strange mental confusion; in part arose from his physical weakness. He did not reflect then that his case was not necessarily hopeless; that nothing in his life which remembrance had recovered need raise a barrier between himself and Columbine. Afterward this thought came to him and brought comfort; now he was overwhelmed by a sense of impotent misery. Helpless in the hand of fate, it seemed to him that this love, of which he was newly aware, was but a fresh device of malignant destiny. He did not even consider whether his affection might be returned; he only felt the impossibility of offering his broken life to Columbine,--of binding her to a past that was uncertain and a future that was insecure. Tears of weakness, and scorn of that weakness, came into his eyes. Their traces were still visible when Columbine returned. "Come," she said, ignoring the signs of his agitation, "you have told me nothing on the story to-day. Just down there," indicating by a pretty sweep of the hand a little pebbly cove lying just below them, "is where Sarah and I found you." "And I would to God," cried poor Tom with sudden fierceness, "that you had left me there." Columbine made, for the moment, no reply to this outburst. She insisted upon his drinking his _bouillon_, despite his protests of disinclination, and then brought him back to the tale of his life.