Vivia bending and gazing at herself in the glass with a flushed and fevered eagerness of rapture. "The wild, sweet tunes that darkly deep Thrill through thy veins and shroud thy sleep, That swing thy blood with proud, glad sway, And beat thy life's arterial play,-- Still wilt thou have this music sweep Along thy brain its pulsing leap,-- Keep love away! keep love away! "The joy of peace that wide and high Like light floods through the soaring sky, The day divine, the night akin, Heaven in the heart, ah, wilt thou win, The secret of the hoarded years, Life rounded as the shining spheres,-- Let love come in! let love come in!" she sang, to case her heart of its swelling gladness. But here Vivia dared not concentrate her recollections, dared not dally with such distant delight,--twisted and tossed her hair into its coils, and once more opened the letter. Ray had not lived for three years under converging influences, years which are glowing wax beneath the seal of fresh impressions, years when one puts off or takes on the tendencies of a lifetime,--Ray had not lived those three school-years without contracting habits, whims, determinations of his own: let her have Beltran's reasons to meet Ray's objections. They were up at the little meadow-side cottage of Mrs. Vennard, Ray's maternal aunt, a quiet widow, who was glad to receive her dying sister in her house a year and a half ago, as she had often received her boys before, and who was still willing to eke out her narrow income with the board of one nephew and any summer guest; and as that summer guest, owing to an old family-friendship that overlooked differences of rank and wealth, Vivia had, for many a season, been established. Here, when bodings of trouble began to darken her sunny fields, she had, in early spring, withdrawn again, leaving her maiden aunt to attend to the affairs of the homestead, or to find more luxurious residence in watering-places or cities, as she chose. For Vivia liked the placid life and freedom of the cottage, and here, too, she had oftenest met those dear friends to whom one winter her father, long since dead, had taken her, and half of all that was pleasant in her life had inwoven itself with the simple surroundings of the place. Here, in that fatal spring when the first tocsin alarmed the land, Ray, now scarcely any longer a boy, yet with a boy's singleness of mind, though possessing neither patience nor power for subtilties of difficult reason and truth, thinking of no lonely portion, but of the one great fact of country, had been fired with spontaneous fervor, and had ever since been like some restive steed champing the bit and quivering to start. As for Vivia, she was a Maryland woman. Too burningly indignant, the blood bubbled in her heart for words sometimes, and she would be glad of Beltran's weapons with which to confront Kay when he returned from Boston, whither, the