To the eyes of Dallington there was no scene so exquisitely home-like as that which he scarcely saw more clearly now than his imagination had seen it as he rode through the night. The room was old, and not large; it was furnished with perfect taste; there was not a showy thing in the whole apartment, but everything that was comfortable and cosy, soft and bright seemed gathered there. Mr. Harris sat on one side of the fire, nursing a cat, and Margaret on the other, with her hand on the head of a dog. A lamp was near on a small table, and the volume of Browning from which she had been reading was laid beside it when John entered. She glanced at him half shyly; she must not let him see how very glad she was, but he did see, and his heart leaped for joy. He took the hand she held toward him, and then, yielding to the hunger of love which impelled him, he gathered her in his arms for one moment, and kissed her tenderly, twice. Afterward, he turned to Mr. Harris with an apologetic remark, “See; I have some mistletoe, and it is Christmas time, you know.” “Very well; if you consider that these give you the right, well and good,” was the reply. “I have a right, established on a better basis than that,” he said. And Margaret, who was about to contradict him, held her peace. She could not say that he had no right when her heart was filled with such glad music at the very sight of him. All day she had been asking herself, “Will he come?” and it was of no use for her to try to disguise the fact that an hour spent with him held a year of happiness for her. They had some fruit, and then, at the urgent request of Mr. Dallington, Margaret went on with the reading, John feasting his eyes upon her bright head and graceful form, and watching the expressive face and sweet lips with a joy that had much resolution in it. “Mine, my darling, my very own, mine you are and must be; I would give the whole world for you, and feel that it was too little.” So his thoughts ran as he listened to the inflections of her beautiful voice, and saw the light on her face. She left off occasionally to discuss the passages she had read. “I am obliged to question Graf now and then, to be sure that he understands,” she said, “and he and I do not always agree as to the meaning. It is well to have another opinion.” Dallington gave his in a most hap-hazard way, and when he was rebuked had the effrontery to confess that he had thought less of the reading than the reader. Yet even he could not do other than listen again to the well-known lines of Rabbi Ben Ezra, and especially the closing stanzas— “But I need, now as then, Thee, God, who mouldest men! And since, not even while the whirl was worst Did I—to the wheel of life, With shapes and colours rife, Bound dizzily—mistake my end, to slake Thy thirst.