"Whew! since when has my little Brownie learned to be sarcastic?" he queries, in genuine astonishment, trying to look into her face, but it is turned away from him, and she is idly stripping the thorns from the stem of a rose she has just broken. Ah! if she could only as easily eradicate the thorns that rankle in her gentle heart! "Why don't you talk to me?" he says, pettishly. "And have I not been talking?" turning an innocent, unconscious face toward him, a piquant smile on her lips. "I know, but without taking any interest," he says, in an injured tone. "Don't you care to talk? Are you weary of me?" "Weary of you!" she laughs. "Ah! that gives me a pretext to quote poetry to you," and she repeats, with a very faint tremor in her voice, the delicious lines of Mrs. Osgood: "Weary of you! I should weary as soon Of a fountain playing its low lute tune, With its mellow contralto lapsing in Like a message of love through this worldly din." He looks down into the faintly flushed face with a light, triumphant smile she does not see. He knows as well, and better than herself, how much she means the poetry that she has repeated in that light, jesting tone. "Thank you," he answers only. "I wish I could think you meant it." She stoops suddenly and breaks off a half-dozen great purplish velvet pansies from a bed on the side of the patch, and puts them into his hands. "'There's pansies--that's for thoughts,'" she says, gayly. "Think what you will." "May I think that you love me?" he queries, audaciously, as only Bruce Conway can do. "I have said think what you will," she answers, growing suddenly crimson. "But why are you throwing my pansies away?" A faint flush crimsons his fair forehead, too. Their eyes look at each other as he answers: "I--I do not like pansies; they are too sad. Sometimes when I stroll down this path with my morning cigar, Lu, they look up at me bathed in glittering dew, and--I am not romantic, child, but they always remind me of blue eyes swimming in tears." "They always remind me of the velvet darkness of Grace Winans' eyes," she says, meditatively. "'There's _rue_!'" he says, and is suddenly silent. The little, irresistible feminine shaft has struck home. He looks down at the flickering sunshine lying in spots on the graveled path, and reflects on the acute perceptions of woman--this little woman--in particular. She sees his pain, and is sorry. "I wonder"--stirring up a little drift of pink blossoms on the path with the tip of her small slippered foot--"I wonder if all our life-path is to be flower-strewn!" A light flashes into his handsome dark eyes as he clasps in his the small hand lying within his arm. "Lulu dearest," he murmurs, "if you will promise to walk hand in hand with me through life, your path shall be strewn with all the flowers love's sunshine can warm into life."