Life seemed to be disintegrating. Margaret and Philip were on the ocean; Rosalie, in Oak Hill Cemetery; the little boy given into her grandmother's keeping until the house on Massachusetts Avenue should be re-opened; and--after all this was the worst--they were going home to Missouri. Her life in Washington was over! Well,--it had been a beautiful time that she had had, she thought with a tightening of the throat, and he, more than anybody else, had made it so. She should always feel grateful to him and love him for that--as a friend. Of course she was nothing to him but a child. And the tightness grew to a lump. She was putting into her trunk a book of views he had brought her--"to remember him by," he had said. She turned the pages listlessly. It did seem too hard that they should have to go home just now! Washington was so beautiful in May, everybody said. A drop fell on the classic columns of the Treasury Building--another--and another. She really could not tell now though she was looking at it so hard whether the pillars were Corinthian or Ionic. She was thinking, "It was on these steps we stood that day--" Strange! strange! how little architecture, art, affairs of State or Nation are to a young girl whose heart is saying, "And I must leave him." * * * * * From that ride she came back to her grandmother with softly shining eyes and the sweet tale that has been told and told and told again since Time was young.... And--would her grandma be willing to give her to him? "But, Bess, I thought you felt that you could never trust yourself to any man after Margaret's experience?" Bess answered earnestly. "Grandma! I wouldn't to anybody in the _world_ but Mr. Harcourt. But it is different with him, you know." When she was gone Mrs. Pennybacker took off her glasses and wiped them. "As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end," she said reverently, "Amen." BOOKS BY GROSSET & DUNLAP Handsomely bound in cloth. Price, 75 cents per volume, postpaid. THE KINDRED OF THE WILD. A Book of Animal Life. With illustrations by Charles Livingston Bull. Appeals alike to the young and to the merely youthful-hearted. Close observation. Graphic description. We get a sense of the great wild and its denizens. Out of the common. Vigorous and full of character. The book is one to be enjoyed; all the more because it smacks of the forest instead of the museum. John Burroughs says "The volume is in many ways the most brilliant collection of Animal Stories that has appeared. It reaches a high order of literary merit." THE HEART OF THE ANCIENT WOOD. Illustrated.