The girl listened and pondered. She tried to follow her lover over the seas of thought upon which he walked; but the venture was beyond her powers, and she returned to the pleasant firm land of a subject nearer her heart. “Are you thinking of me?” she asked in a low tone, and with an appealing smile. “No,” he smiled back. “I must own that I was not. But I ought to have been. I do think of you a great deal.” “More than I deserve?” she queried, still suspicious that she was not sufficiently prized to satisfy her longings for affection. He laughed outright. “No, not more than you deserve; not as much as you deserve; you deserve a great deal. How many times are you going to ask me these questions?” “Every day. A hundred times a day. Shall you get tired of them?” “Of course not. But what does it mean? Do you doubt me?” “No. But I want to hear you say that you think of me, over and over again. It gives me such pleasure to hear you say it! It is such a great happiness that it seems as if it were my only happiness.” Before Bessie had fallen in love with Foster, and especially before her engagement to him, there had been a time when she had talked more to the satisfaction of the male critic. But now her whole soul was absorbed in the work of loving. She had no thought for any other subject; none, at least, while with _him_. Her whole appearance and demeanor shows how completely she is occupied by this master passion of woman. A smile seems to exhale constantly from her face; if it is not visible on her lips, nor, indeed, anywhere, still you perceive it; if it is no more to be seen than the perfume of a flower, still you are conscious of it. It is no figurative exaggeration to say that there is within her soul an incessant music, like that of waltzes, and of all sweet, tender, joyous melodies. If you will watch her carefully, and if you have the delicate senses of sympathy, you also will hear it. Are we wrong in declaring that the old, old story of clinging hearts is more fascinating from age to age, as human thoughts become purer and human feelings more delicate? We believe that love, like all other things earthly, is subject to the progresses of the law of evolution, and grows with the centuries to be a more various and exquisite source of happiness. This girl is more in love than her grandmother, who made butter and otherwise wrought laboriously with her own hands, had ever found it possible to be. An organization refined by the manifold touch of high civilization, an organization brought to the keenest sensitiveness by poetry and fiction and the spiritualized social breath of our times, an organization in which muscle is lacking and nerve overabundant, she is capable of an affection which has the wings of imagination, which can soar above the ordinary plane of belief, which is more than was once human.