"Oh, Maryllia, we're having such fun!" she exclaimed--"Mr. Adderley is talking words, and I'm talking music! We'll show you how it goes presently!" "Do, please!" laughed Maryllia; "It must be delightful! Mr. Walden and I are going into the rose-garden. We shall be back in a few minutes!" She moved along, her white dress floating softly over the green turf, its delicate flounces and knots of rosy ribbon looking like a trail of living flowers. Walden, walking at her side, nodded smilingly as he passed close by Cicely and Julian, his tall athletic figure contrasting well with Maryllia's fairy-like grace,--and presently, crossing from the lawn to what was called the 'Cherry- Tree Walk,' because the path led under an arched trellis work over which a couple of hundred cherry-trees were trained to form a long arbour or pergola, they turned down it, and drawing closer together in conversation, under the shower of white blossoms that shed fragrance above their heads, they disappeared. Cicely, struck by a certain picturesqueness, or what she would have called a 'stage effect' in the manner of their exit, stopped abruptly in the pianissimo humming of a tune with which she declared she had been suddenly inspired by some lines Adderley had just recited. "Isn't she pretty!" she said, indicating with a jerk of her ever gesticulating hand the last luminous glimmer of Maryllia's vanishing gown--"She's like Titania,--or Kilmeny in Fairyland. Why don't you write something about HER, instead of about some girl you 'imagine' and never see?" Adderley, lying at his ease on the grass, turned on his arm and likewise looked after the two figures that had just passed, as it seemed, into a paradise of snowy flowers. "The girls I 'imagine' are always so much better than those I see,"- -he replied, with uncomplimentary candour. "Thank you!" said Cicely--"You are quite rude, you know! But it doesn't matter." He stared up at her in vague astonishment. "Oh, I didn't mean you!" he explained--"You're not a girl." "No, really!" ejaculated Cicely--"Then what am I, pray?" He looked at her critically,--at her thin sallow little face with the intense eyes burning like flame under her well-marked black eyebrows,--at her drooping angular arms and unformed figure, tapering into the scraggy, long black-stockinged legs which ended in a pair of large buckled shoes that covered feet of a decidedly flat- iron model,--then he smiled oddly.