She turned, with a slight start, and some vague trouble in her face. "Oh!" she said, "don't you think I shall be sure to be happy? There seems to be no reason why I should not. Oh, I hope I shall be happy; I--I don't know what I should do if I wasn't happy! I can't imagine it." "Everybody is not happy," he said, his voice almost tremulous. "But," she faltered, "but I--I have always been happy"--She stopped, her eyes appealing to him piteously. "I suppose, after all, that is a poor reason," she added; "but it almost seems like one." "I wish it were one!" he said. "Don't look like that. It--it hurts me. If any sacrifice of mine--any suffering"-- She stirred a little, moved in some vague way by the intensity of his tone, and as she did so the odor of the heliotrope floated toward him. "Bertha!"--he said, "Bertha"-- He did not know what he would have said--and the words were never spoken--for at that moment the enchanted hour was ended. It was the professor himself who broke in upon it--the professor who opened the door and entered, hungry and absent-minded, the fire-light striking upon his spectacles and seeming to enlarge them tremendously as he turned his head from side to side, inhaling the air of the room with evident delight. "Flowers, eh?" he said. "What kind of flowers? The air seems full of them." Bertha rose and went to him, Tredennis watching her girlish pale-gray figure, as it moved across the room, with a pained and bewildered sense of having lost something which he might never regain. "They are heliotropes," she said; "Philip brought them to me. It is my first bouquet, so I shall keep it until I am an old woman." A week later, Tredennis left Washington. It so chanced that he took his departure on the night rendered eventful by the first party. In the excitement attendant upon the preparations for this festivity, and for his own journey, he saw even less of Bertha than usual. When she appeared at the table she was in such bright, high spirits that the professor found her--for some private reason of his own--more absorbing than ever. His spectacles followed her with an air of deep interest, he professed an untrained anxiety concerning the dress she was to wear, appearing to regard it as a scientific object worthy of attention. "She's very happy!" he would say to Tredennis again and again. "She's very happy!" And having said it he invariably rubbed his forehead abstractedly and pushed his spectacles a trifle awry, without appearing conscious of it. When the carriage Tredennis had ordered came to the door, at ten o'clock, the coupé which was to convey Bertha to the scene of her first triumphs had just driven up. A few seconds later Bertha turned from her mirror and took up her bouquet of white rose-buds and heliotrope, as a servant knocked at the door. "The carriage is here, miss," he said; "and Mr. Tredennis is going away, and says would you come and let him say good-by."