“Oh, what--what--will happen next?” The question repeated and repeated itself rhythmically in her mind. She had so often of late proposed it to herself. In her blue eyes prayer, doubt, anxiety, and hope shone together in puzzled complexity. She looked very lovely, and if she seemed several tints less merry than she had been, a thought more pensive than of yore, nobody could like her any the less for that. A true young girl’s inner mind is so graciously mysterious, teeming with so many delicate fancies all its own, and such strange and delicious dreams throng there, that no man worthy the name would be bold enough to so much as try and probe them. She took a few steps on the thick moss over-glazed by fragrant cedar needles and fell again to admiring the play of the sunbeams on the velvet slope that dropped away from her little feet. Behind her the duskiness of the park, crossed and recrossed by flights of furtive wings, slept undisturbed; and, suddenly attracted by a wondrous-fat beetle of bronzed corselet and lance-like antennæ, she knelt on the elastic brown of the moss to watch his busy, fussy course the closer. Soon she discovered that another beetle a trifle more gracile in make, less adult in appearance, more green of armor, and far more brilliant, was scurrying up from the opposite side, horns in rest--as it were--a bellicose glint on the bulging surface of its beady eyes. “They’re going to fight,” she whispered, and glanced swiftly around to find the cause of this warlike humor. Ah, yes! there it was, not far away under the shelter of a foxglove-leaf--a beautiful lady-beetle flying the dazzling colors of a cantharide rose-bug all ashimmer with metallic splendor. So absorbed was she in the impending combat that she failed to hear a step coming along the sanded path four yards away. It came quickly, determinately, but a few paces from where she still knelt it halted abruptly, and for a breathing-space the melodious silence of the wooded solitude trembled anew in the balance. The beetles were advancing threateningly toward each other; the fun would soon grow fast and furious. The “Gamin” bent closer, a smile of amusement parting her lips, and then the tiny crackle of a branch made her turn and look. “Basil!” she cried. “Basil!” There was such surprised delight and at the same time such tender sympathy in the exclamation, that Marguerite’s instinct alone could have blended it so well. “Yes, it’s I,” he said, stating a patent fact in the rather dull way he used at times of embarrassment, without moving an inch toward her; then he came forward, hand outstretched, with a “How are you, Marguerite?” that fell cold and over-indifferent on the mellowness of the air.