"I say," he had declared, "I don't know what has come over Minnie this last ten days; she's been as cross as two sticks, and generally she's pretty even-tempered for a girl, you know. But she's been so touchy lately; she nearly took my head off this morning! I guess you had better have Dr. Cheever come around and prescribe for her. Cocaine for a bad temper is what she needs now, I can tell you!" Although he was a rejected lover, he was not melancholy. In the springtime youth feels the joy of living, and Richard Demarest took delight in the beauty of the day. The foliage was everywhere fresh and vigorous after the persistent rains of April, and a scent of young blossoms came to him from a clump of bushes behind the path. A group of half a dozen girls flashed past him on their wheels, laughing lightly as they sped along home, each of them with a bunch of fragrant lilacs lashed to her handle-bar. He followed them with his eye till they turned out of the Park; and then at the entrance he saw the girl he was waiting for riding her bicycle carefully across the car-tracks in Fifty-ninth Street. Her father and grandfather were with her, one on each side. Dr. Demarest sprang on his wheel and sped on ahead. When he came to the foot of the Mall he swerved to the westward. Then he turned and retraced his path, reaching the branching of the ways just as General Contoit with his son and granddaughter arrived there. The General was nearly seventy, but he sat his wheel with a military stiffness, holding himself far more carefully than his son, the Professor. Between them came Miss Minnie Contoit, a slim slip of a girl, in a light-brown cloth suit, with her pale, blond hair coiled tightly under a brown alpine hat. They had just come up a hill, and the General's face was ruddy, but the girl's was as colorless as ever. Demarest had often wondered why it was that no exercise ever brought a flush to her ivory cheeks. He watched her now as her grandfather caught sight of him, and cried out: "Hello, Doctor! Out for a spin?" He saw her look up, and then she glanced away swiftly, as though to choose her course of conduct before she acknowledged his greeting. "Good afternoon, General; how well you are looking this spring!" said Demarest. "Good afternoon, Professor. And you, too, Miss Contoit. Going round the Park, are you? May I join you?" He looked at her as he asked the question. It was her grandfather who answered: "Come along, come along! We shall be delighted to have you!" She said nothing. They were all four going up on the east side of the Mall, and they had already left behind them the bronze mass-meeting of misshapen celebrities which disfigures that broad plateau. A Park omnibus was loitering in front of them, and they could not pass it four abreast. "Come on, papa," cried the girl; "let's leave grandpa and Dr. Demarest to take care of each other! We had better go ahead and show them the way!"