We were walking slowly and had reached a park, and I guilefully led her by a roundabout path through a part where the shrubbery made it more secluded than the rest. I can see the spot now as then I saw it: a curving gray road sloping down under overhanging trees, and a path dappled with sunlight dipping into masses of shrubbery with a thrush glancing through them, like a little brown sprite playing hide-and-seek. As we neared a seat, I suggested that we should sit down and I was pleased at the way in which she yielded; quite as if she had thought of it herself. It was almost the first time that I had her quite to myself in fair surroundings where we were face to face in body and soul. I felt, somehow, as though I had made a great step up to a new and a higher level. We had reached together a new resting-place, a higher atmosphere; almost a new land. And the surroundings were fresh to me in the city, for we had strayed out of the beaten track. I remember that a placid pool, shaded by drooping willows and one great sycamore, lay at our feet, on which a couple of half-domesticated wild-fowl floated, their graceful forms reflected in the mirror below them. I pointed to one and said, "Alcyone," and my heart warmed when she smiled and said, "Yes, at peace. 'The past unsighed for, and the future sure.'" A quotation from a poet always pleases me. It is as if one found a fresh rose in the street, and where it comes from the lips and heart of a girl it is as though she had uttered a rose. "Are you fond of Wordsworth?" I asked. "He seems to me very spiritual." "Yes. In fact, I think I am fond of all poetry. It lifts me up out of the grosser atmosphere of the world, which I enjoy, too, tremendously--and seems to place me above and outside of myself. Some, even, that I don't understand. I seem to be borne on wings that I can't see into a rarer atmosphere that I can only feel, but not describe." "That," I said, "as I understand it, is the province of poetry--and also, perhaps, its test." "It has somewhat the same effect on me that saying my prayers has. I believe in something infinitely good and pure and blessed. It soothes me. I get into a better frame of mind." "I should think your frame of mind was always 'a better frame,'" I said, edging toward the personal compliment and yet feeling as though I were endangering a beautiful dream. "Oh! you don't know how worse I can be--how angry--how savage." "Terribly so, I should think. You look like an ogress." "I feel like one sometimes, too," she nodded. "I can be one when I have the provocation." "As--for example?" "Well, let me see?--Well,--for example, once--oh! quite a time ago--it was just after I met you--the very next day--" (My heart bounded that she could remember the very next day after meeting me--and should set dates by that important event. I wanted to say, that is the beginning of my era; but I feared)--"I got into a dreadful passion--I was really ferocious."