Almost before I knew that the Neals were accepted as familiar friends, I was startled one morning, while we were at breakfast, by the appearance of Annie on her pony, looking in at our dining-room window. She had a pretty way of riding up noiselessly on the green grass, and making her pony, which was tame as a Newfoundland dog, mount the stone steps, and tap with his nose on the panes of the long glass door till we opened it. I never saw her so angelically beautiful as she was this morning. Her cheeks were flushed and her dark blue eyes sparkled like gems in the sun. Presently she said, hesitating a little,-- "Edward Neal is at the gate; may I bring him in? I told him he might come, but he said it was too like burglary;" and she cantered off again without waiting to hear my mother's permission. All that morning Annie Ware and Edward Neal sat with me on our piazza. I looked and listened and watched like one in a dream, or under a spell. I foresaw, I foreknew what was to come; with the subtle insight of love, I saw all. Never had I seen Annie so stirred into joyousness by George's presence as she seemed to be by this boy's. The two together overflowed in a sparkling current of gayety, which was irresistible. They seemed two divine children sent out on a mission to set the world at play. What Edward Neal's more sensuous and material nature lacked, was supplied by the finer, subtler quality of Annie's. From that first day I could never disguise from myself that they seemed, so far as mere physical life goes, the absolute counterparts of each other. I need not dwell on this part of my story. When young hearts are drawing together, summer days speed on very swiftly. George Ware, alas! was kept at the West week after week, until it came to be month after month. My uncle and aunt seemed deliberately to shut their eyes to the drift of events. I think they were so thankful to watch Annie's bounding health and happiness, to hear glad voices and merry laughs echoing all day in their house, that they could not allow themselves to ask whether a new kernel of bitterness, of danger, lay at the core of all this fair seeming. As for the children, they did not know that they were loving each other as man and woman. Edward Neal was only twenty-one, Annie but nineteen, and both were singularly young and innocent of soul. And so it came to be once more the early autumn; the maple leaves were beginning to be red, and my chrysanthemums had again set their tiny round disks of buds. Edward, and Annie had said no word of love to each other, but the whole town looked on them as lovers, and people began to reply impatiently and incredulously to our assurances that no engagement existed.