"It was the last one I could find in the garden," she said, breathlessly, and with its color in her cheeks. Before I could speak she was gone. "It shall be treated with reverence, like the feeling which led to the gift," I murmured sadly. "Heaven grant that it may be only the impulse of a girlish fancy;" and I filled a little vase with water and placed the bud near the window, where the cool night air could blow upon it. Still Miss Warren remained at the piano. "How singularly fond of music he is!" I thought. I darkened my room, and sat at the window that I might hear every note. The old garden, half hidden by trees, looked cool and Eden-like in the light of the July moon, athwart whose silver hemisphere fleecy clouds were drifting like the traces of thought across a bright face. Motionless shadows stretched toward the east, from which the new day would come, but with a dreary sinking of heart I felt as it each coming day would bring a heavier burden. But a little time passed before I recognized Chopin's Nocturne, to which I had listened with kindling hope on the night of the storm. Was it my own mood, or did she play it with far more pathos and feeling than on that never-to-be-forgotten evening? Be that as it may, it evoked a fiercer storm of unavailing passion and regret in my mind. In bitterness of heart I groaned aloud and insulted God. "It was a cruel and terrible thing," I charged, "to mock a creature with such a hope. Why was such power over me given to her when it was of no use?" But I will say no more of that hour of weak human idolatry. It was a revelation to me of the depths of despair and wretchedness into which one can sink when unsustained by manly fortitude or Christian principle. It is in such desperate, irrational moods that undisciplined, ill-balanced souls thrust themselves out from the light of God's sunshine and the abundant possibilities of future good. I now look back on that hour with shame, and cannot excuse it even by the fact that I was enfeebled in mind as well as body by disease. We often never know ourselves or our need until after we have failed miserably under the stress of some strong temptation. I was the worse the next day for my outburst of passion, and the wretched night that followed, and did not leave my room; but I was grim and rigid in my purpose to retrieve myself. I appeared to be occupied with my mail and paper much of the day, and I wrote a very complimentary paragraph concerning the banker's gift for the meeting-house. Mr. Hearn and Miss Warren were out riding much of the time. I saw them drive away with a lowering brow, and was not disarmed of my bitterness because I saw, through the half-closed blinds, that the young girl stole a swift glance at my window.