The other was shrewd enough to humor her. They would get to work at the roses in the morning, and they would take up Alexander H. Stephens’ Confederate History without delay; also Sylvia might take the bills as they came in each month, and find out who had ordered what, and prevent the tradesmen from charging for the same thing twice over. But of course, he did not tell her any of his real worries, nor let her see his bank-books and accounts; nor could he quite see his way to promise that Aunt Nannie should let her alone while she settled into old-maidenhood. Aunt Nannie came round the next morning, as it happened. Sylvia did not see her, being up to the wrists in black loam in the rose-garden; but she learned the purpose of the visit at lunchtime. “Sylvia,” said her mother, “do you think it’s decent for us to go much longer without inviting Mr. van Tuiver over here?” “Do you think he wants to come?” asked Sylvia, with a touch of her old mischief. “Your Aunt Nannie seems to think so,” was the reply—given quite naïvely. “I wrote to ask him to dinner. I hope you won’t mind.” Sylvia said that she would find some way to make the occasion tolerable. And she found a quite unique way. It was one of her times for bitterness, when she hated the world, and especially the male animals upon it, and herself for a fool for not having known about them. It chanced to be the same day of the week that she had prepared for Frank’s coming, and had introduced him to the family with so many tremblings and agonies of soul. So now, when she came to dress, she picked out the gown she had worn that evening, and had them bring her a bunch of the same kind of roses: which seemed to her a perfectly diabolical piece of cynicism—like to the celebrating of a “black mass”! She descended, radiant and lovely, in a mood of somewhat terrible gaiety. She laughed and all but sang at the dinner-table; she joked with van Tuiver, and flouted him outrageously—and in the next breath charmed and delighted him, to the bewilderment of the family, who knew nothing about her adventures with Royalty, and the various strange moods to which its presence drove her. In the course of that meal she told him a story—one of the wildest and most wonderful of her stories. So at least it seemed to me, who for years have been longing for a poet to take it up and make a ballad of it—a real American ballad! It is curious, but I can hear the very rhyme and rhythm of that ballad, which I cannot write. I wonder if I may not awaken in some grey dawn, and find it all complete, singing itself in my mind!