Whether she slept or whether she waked, it was the same mood of restless excited happiness. It seemed but a reflection of it from the world outside when she flung open her heavy shutters in the morning and saw the sky clear as crystal, bluish green at its zenith and, over above the houses opposite, flushed red as a rose. The maples rocked in the wind, along the corridor across the way the shallow rain pools in the worn pavement had turned to ice, making shimmer and shine but perilous footing. The wind and the rocking and the singing were her own restless mood, which made her vibrant to a song which she knew not for joy or for some feeling yet unnamable. It was not wholly joy, for her first thought of others struck her with dismay. Susan, before she had dressed, came into the room, a great box in her hands. "Dat boy done said p'intidly dis time 'twas for yuh. He 'low dat Mr. Lawson call Mr. Cook up to de 'phone las' night an' said as how dey was to be hyar befor' sun up dis mornin'." "Oh!" cried Frances with a long ecstatic sigh, as she uncovered the sweet red roses and buried her blushing face in their fragrant hearts, "how beautiful, how sweet, how--"--"thoughtful" she was about to add, when she remembered Susan and her secret. But Susan could read the tale of that shy, sweet delight in Frances' face and her own grew more anxious and wrinkled. "Yuh'd bettah hurry up an' dress," she said, grumpily. "'Tis nigh upon eight o'clock and yo' pa won't eben think his breakfast taste good if yuh isn't there." It was the first shot she could think of, but it told. Frances laid down the great handful of beauties she had been holding ecstatically close to her face. "I will be down in a moment," she said soberly, and, then, as Susan still lingered, "you had better hurry yourself and see that everything is ready." As she brushed the rebellious dark hair into the waves above her forehead she saw her reflected face through a mist of tears; once, twice, in the happy evening before, the thought of her father had come like a stab through the joy still only half believed in and shyly dreamed of. She had not dared follow that thought to the end. It would show her the deep sorrow of her own heart were she to leave him to live her life many hundred miles away amongst people and surroundings not of his kind and beyond his ken; it would show her, what was harder still, the desolation of his loneliness without her. She could not face it yet, but must put it away from her with all the tremulous uncertainties quivering into life in her heart, and must live in the moment. She fastened a great red rose in her dainty waist and then picked up a smaller bud. "This is for you," she declared, as she hastened into the library before the breakfast bell had rung, and found her father waiting a trifle impatiently before the fire.