The girls took their summer vacation from study, and Maud worked on her novel, Edith at her picture. In the school-room Mrs. Wilson and Una diligently climbed the ladder of knowledge through the long summer mornings. In the afternoons the four ladies took long country rides, and in the short evenings there were dinner and Eliot. They had music always to enliven them, and very often neighbors and friends dropped in and made the time pass agreeably. Often Eliot, who, as a newspaper man, had tickets to concerts, lectures, readings, and plays, took them out to pleasant entertainments. He managed, too, to buy Una a little brown pony to ride, and she had some charming morning canters by the side of her husband, who made the carriage-horse do service on his own behalf. Sylvie Van Zandt would have said it was a humdrum life, but Eliot and Una thoroughly enjoyed it. Nay, to her it seemed an elysium, this bright home, with its kind, friendly faces and gentle words, so unlike her life with Mme. Lorraine. Una had learned to read and write with perfect facility and surprising ease, and passed on to higher studies. Of French she already had some knowledge--indeed, as much as she had of English, having spoken either at will in her New Orleans home--so this language was very easy to acquire now. For music she developed a talent equal to that of her husband, and he was delighted to find that she had a sweet, low alto voice that blended in perfect harmony with his own. She began to read poetry and novels now, and their strange sweetness thrilled her very soul. She learned that wonderful word, Love, and some of its subtler meanings. It grew to be the theme of her thoughts and dreams, although in the exquisite shyness that offset her child-like frankness she never even named the word to Eliot. But, for all that, she began to comprehend its mystic meaning, and to say to herself, with deep tenderness: "It is what Eliot feels for me and I for him." Yet this blind young lover-husband said to himself sometimes, discontentedly: "She is very bright over other lessons, but very slow learning the one I am trying to teach her so patiently every day." Every day she grew more beautiful and graceful under the clever tuition of Mrs. Wilson, who delighted in her task of forming the unformed girl. They spent happy hours over the piano together, patient ones over books and blackboards. For several months she never even heard the words "A Little Nobody," under which she had chafed so often at Mme. Lorraine's. Life began to have a new, sweet meaning, whose key-note was love. She was so sorry when Eliot went away with his friendly hand-clasp in the morning, so glad when he returned in the evening. Sometimes she said to herself that she would not have minded kissing him now, as Maud and Edith did every morning; but, since the day when she promised to marry him, and then rejected his kiss, he had never offered another.