“An understandable remark; exactly what I should have said fifty years ago; I didn't know the girls of to-day had it in 'em. You've got a good heart, Anthony,” she enunciated. Anthony shuffled his feet. “A good heart is a rare thing to find in the young. But I misdoubt, in a world of mammon, you'll pay for it dear; I'm afraid you will never be successful, so called. It's selling men that that success is got, and buying women, and it's never in you to do those. _You_ wouldn't wish an old woman gone for the sum she'd laid aside.” Her fancies had been wilder than usual, he concluded, as the holt of the door at his hack slid home. Alonzo and her money, one he considered as actual, as imminent, as the other, occupied to the exclusion of all else her dimming brain. He had hoped to converse with her more fully on the inexhaustible subject of Eliza Dreen, but her vagaries had interrupted him continuously. He decided that she was an antiquated bore, but made a mental note to return before the store of wood was consumed. XI IN the evening he stopped from force of habit at Doctor Allhop's drugstore: the familiar group was assembled behind the screen at the rear, the conversation flowed in the old channels. Anthony lounged and listened, but his attention continually wandered--he heard other, more musical, tones; his vision was filled with a candid face and widely-opened eyes in the green gloom of a pergola. He passed out by the bevy at the sodawater fountain to the street. In the artificial day of the electric lights the early summer foliage was as virulently green as the toy trees of a miniature ark; the sky was a breathless vault filled with blue mists that veiled the stars; under the locust trees the blooms were spilled odorously, whitely, on the pavement. He walked aimlessly to the outskirts of the town. Across the dim valley, against the hills merged into the night and sky, he could see glimmering the low lights of Hydrangea House. It would be pleasant, he thought, to be closer to that abode of delight; and, crossing the road, he vaulted a fence, and descended through a tangle of aromatic grass to the brook that threaded the meadow below. A star swam imaged on the black, wrinkled surface of the water: it suggested vague, happy images--Eliza was the star, and he was the brook, holding her mirrored in his dreams. He passed cows, blowing softly into the sod; a flock of sheep broke before him like an argent cloud on the heaven of the fields; and, finally, reached the boundary of James Dreen's acres. He forced his way through the budding hedge from which the place had its name, and, in a cup of the lawn like a pool of brimming, fragrant shadows, sat watching the lights of the house.