"I should not care for a cold, duty kiss," he thought. "I will wait for her love and her kisses together." In the meantime, he worked very hard at his literary duties, trying to double the moderate salary he had enjoyed before his marriage, that his sisters might not feel the change. The pony had been quite an extravagance, but he had heard her express a timid wish for one, and by some severe self-denial in the matter of coats and cigars, had managed to gratify her wish. But he did not chafe against the silent sacrifices he made for her sake. Each one only made the dark-eyed girl dearer to his heart, and the memory of that last day in madame's prison always made him shudder and long to clasp her passionately to his heart. On his strong white arm there was a slight scar made by the wound of a pocket-knife. He often looked at it when alone, and said to himself: "To that little scar my darling owes her life." But Una, all unconscious of the debt, still sweetly ignorant of his blindness, went on with her studies, and her music, and her poetry reading, making him the hero of all in her silent, adoring fashion. There was one thing that touched and pleased him. She had not forgotten one of the many songs with which he had beguiled the dreariness of their imprisonment, and she had insisted on learning each one. The two that she liked best were "The Warrior Bold" and "Two Little Lives." Mrs. Wilson and the girls noticed that she had a fashion of humming over one little verse very often to herself: "It was a lark that sung in the heaven, While all the world stood still to hear, Many a maiden looked from her knitting, And in her heart there crept a tear. Down came the lark and sung to the daisy, Sung to it only songs of love, Till in the twilight slumbered the daisy, Turning its sweet face to heaven above." She never said to her young husband now, as she had said that time in their prison, "You are the lark and I the little daisy," but she thought it all the more, and the fanciful thought pleased her well. Maud and Edith, who had first taken Una's part out of generous loyalty to their brother, now began to like their sister-in-law more for her own sake. At first they said: "It is not so bad as we feared at first. She is learning very fast, and she is really very good and very pretty. And even although she is of obscure origin, she is a Van Zandt now, and that is enough." Maud used to read her whole chapters of the wonderful novel, and when Una's color rose and her eyes sparkled with mirth or feeling, the young authoress was delighted. She took it as a tribute to her genius, and was cheered and encouraged in her delightful work. Edith, on her part, appropriated the girl for a model, and made her pose for her benefit every day in the little studio at the top of the house. At last the two girls unanimously voted her a decided acquisition.