"Don't talk like that, Gerald!" cried Aurora. "Don't say anything so awful! Now keep still while I talk, listen while I tell you. You're going on painting in your own way, but some one--see?--some one is going to arise bright enough to recognize how perfectly wonderful your pictures are. Keep still. You mustn't despise success, you know, success is what everybody needs and wants. You're going to succeed. Keep still. Stupid people will want to buy your pictures because the people who know about such things have told the public how wonderful they are. Then you'll grow rich and famous. You won't be either eccentric or solitary. You'll have hosts of admiring friends. I guess you could have them now, if you wanted to. You won't be melancholy. You'll be happy. In your home there will be a nice wife. Why are you supposing you'll never marry? A dear true beautiful girl who thinks the world of you and that you think the world of. And when you're an old gentleman with your grandchildren playing at your knee, you'll say to yourself, 'Aurora told me so!'" She was all cheering smiles and dimples again. "Be sure you remember now," she said, holding up a finger and shaking it to mark her bidding, "to say to yourself, 'Aurora told me so!'" It was a pity almost that Gerald should not have gone home at that point. He would have left with undividedly fond and approving feelings; he would have left tied to Aurora by a thousand sweet humanities in common, as well as impressed afresh by the depth and mysteriousness of woman. But he had either forgotten or was disregarding the hour--the clock on the mantelpiece, like most ornamental clocks, was not going; the bliss of being warm for the first time in days, warm through and through, warm to the middle of his heart, made him careless of correctness; and so he stayed on, to be rudely jarred by and by out of his contentment, and take with him finally into the night a renewed, even sharpened, perception of those exasperating faults which made Mrs. Hawthorne, as he named it, impossible. Because they seemed to be on such solid terms of friendship after the long evening before the fire, when they had sorrowed together and sympathized; when he had been permitted to hold and press her hands; when with a veritable mutual outgoing of the heart they had vied in prophesying for each other fair and happy days, Gerald found the boldness--and found it without much strain--the boldness to utter a request which had burned on his lips before, but which he had repressed, saying to himself that what Mrs. Hawthorne did was no affair of his. "Aurora," he said--she was after this evening Mrs. Hawthorne to him only in the hearing of others,--"Aurora, I want to ask a favor, a great favor." "Go ahead. I guess it's granted." "I wish I felt sure; but I'm afraid. Say you will not take part in the amateur variety show at _mi-carême_."