thickets; for the young shoots, them'selves old now, had grown up year after year in wild luxuriance. The day, which was nearly spent, had been softly bright with the haze which makes the summer heat sultry; but with the first approach of the cool evening, the flowers lifted

For some reason the dinner was an unusually silent affair, though Llorente and Mr. Lingarde kept up a quiet conversation on business matters. Nor after dinner did the conversation seem inclined to become more general. Louis brought out the chess - table, and Fay's whole mind was soon engaged in the study of moves, while Louis divided his attention between the game and watching Roberta and Mr. Llorente. Roberta was playing in an abstracted manner a soft sweet air, occasionally speaking to Mr. Llorente. At last, she began to sing in a rare rich contralto voice the vesper song which she had so often sung at the convent. Soon after she had finished, Mr. Llorente took his leave, and all rose as with one impulse. They felt the relief which one feels when the electric tension of the atmosphere, close and stifling, breaks out in heavy peals of thunder.

After that life at Mossland flowed on, apparently the same as before -apparently, though each knew that there was a difference, all the greater because not one could have told just what it was.

The June roses were in bloom-crimson, scarlet, palest buff, and purest white-the velvet turf was variegated with fallen petals; yet for every rose which fell a hundred more were ready to spring into life, for both garden and lawn at Mossland were bowers of fragrance. Rose-bushes grew everywhere -old and gnarled, with woody stems more like trunks than stems—and the bushes some of them were like tangled VOL. 15.-18.

again the incense which before they had been too lazily languid to distill. The sun was yet an hour's height above the horizon, when on one of the smallest of the rustic seats upon the edge of the slope in front of the house Roberta and Llorente seated themselves, or rather he seated himself, for Roberta was still standing, looking up at the window of Fay's room, where, framed in by the pale blue curtains, Fay was sitting, looking like the dream of a water-lily floating calmly on the sea-blue of the waters, or like one of Murillo's angel faces peering out at you from wreaths of cloud.

As the days of spring had warmed and lengthened into those of summer, Fay had seemed to yield to a weary painless lassitude, yet uncomplaining she persisted in calling herself well. It was the heat, the sultry wind, which took her breath away. To-morrow she would be stronger and better. Roberta, on the contrary, seemed filled with a restless life. The summer heat intensified her beauty, which deepened and brightened as a tropical plant would do, taken from one of our conservatories and restored to its native soil and sun. No day was too long or too warm. She was up long before sunrise, and sometimes until far into the night she wandered among the roses.

"I think, Roberta, that you must be a descendant of the sun-worshipers," Fay had said to her one afternoon, when she had returned from a walk at an hour when the sun dropped fire.

"Because I am never too warm?"

"No; but because you seem determined to sacrifice to the sun. For if

"One can not warm fire."

"Meaning that you are warmer than the sun?"

This day had been one of the hottest, and when Roberta had proposed to Fay to go down on the lawn, Fay had answered wearily:

"I can not; the coolness must come to me up here, before I can seek it out there."

As Roberta seated herself near Mr. Llorente, she drew down from the bush at her side a branch, which was one cluster of roses and buds - the buds palest pink; the blossoms deepest rose, so full of colored petals that the yellow heart was quite hidden.

"Mossland! It should have been Roseland," she said, thinking aloud.

"The moss was here first. The roses came at the thought of one who loved them above all other flowers," observed Mr. Llorente absently.

"How lovely to have one's thoughts turn to roses! I, too, love them more than all the rest. Indeed, I think I have an unholy passion for them. I kill them with kindness. I can not get enough of their fragrance, or I take it all at once. See here!" She plucked a rose, buried her face in it for an instant, inhaled a long breath, and when she drew her bright glowing face away, the rose-leaves hung limp and drooping. "The rose had passed its first bloom, perhaps," said Llorente.

"Not so; for the buds do the same. They never open after I smell them, and their fragrance intoxicates me. I never had roses enough before, nor have I now, for I can not pick and have them all."

"You ought not to pardon yourself for the selfishness of that speech."

"Not selfish, because they are my heritage with all the rest, left to me by that one whose thoughts sweeten the air

into his eyes as she spoke.

"You know of her, then?"
"Yes, Elsie told me."
"All?"

"Yes-no, not all; no one could do that, not even she herself."

"I am very glad," said he at length. "Why glad? I am not. I am more sorry than for any other thing that ever happened to me. Before, I had only a vague consciousness that I was a bitter memory. Now, the knowledge, the certainty, has taken everything from me. I can do nothing. All I like is of hermy music most of all. Sometimes I think that I will never play or sing any more. And then the longing comes over me, and I can not help myself."

"I have never heard you sing but once."

"And then, her song."
"A coincidence, certainly."

"No, not a coincidence. Some force without me impelled me to sing that song. I could no more have helped it than I could have stopped breathing. I listened to myself as consciously as if I had been another person, and all the time I marked its effect upon you and my father." Roberta spoke rapidly and earnestly.

"That may be so, but it proves nothing, except that your mind was filled with her story, and you had brooded over it until you had become morbid. Afterward you learned that it was a song she used to sing, and your sensations since you have confounded with those which you felt at the time."

He continued again, as Roberta did not speak: "I feel that you have in one way suffered a wrong, and I may be able to help you right again. You are like Alice"- he spoke the name without hesitation, but so tenderly that the quick tears sprung into Roberta's eyes

"like her in many ways. I mean by that, that the resemblance is not mere

ly outward. But dispossess yourself of the idea that because of that resemblance you must live under a ban. Her life can have no influence on your life unless you choose to let it. If you bring willful pain and suffering to another heart it will not be fate, but your will, your choice so to do; and you will be responsible, doubly so, in that you have had her lesson to teach you." Roberta made no answer. She was wondering how he could speak so gently if he had loved Alice so deeply. Perhaps he divined her thoughts, for he said: "It is because of your great likeness that I am so anxious you should fulfill the promise of her life."

"Mr. Llorente, if she wronged you, tell me how you can speak so of her. Why, even I have felt that I could hate even as I despise her."

"She did not wrong me. She wronged herself as one can not wrong another. I can speak of her because I did and always shall love her. To me it was as if she had died; I never think of her in any other way."

float on and on until music changes into color, and the color sinks down into the hearts of the roses."

"Then the roses could give it back to you, and through you to me."

"You are right; if you will come to the house I will give it to you now." She spoke eagerly, and rose as she spoke; her eyes gleamed like stars with pure white light, her lips and cheeks had gathered into themselves the deep hue of the roses.

Llorente stopped her: "Not now; I prefer to receive it from your hand, written; then I shall not lose it."

"But it will not be the same!" cried Roberta, a shade of disappointment flitting over her face.

"Not the same, but more and better." A book had slipped from Roberta's lap to Llorente's feet when she had risen. He stooped to pick it up, at the same time asking what it was?

"I do not know," answered Roberta indifferently; "I can not even say what it is about, though I have just read the last sentence-‘and they lived hap

"That is all you need, is it not?"

"No, it is not enough for me. I wish to know why they were happy; what the colors of the rays were which made up their line of happy light."

"And that would not satisfy you. Another's happiness is never just what we would choose. Even our own will not bear too close analysis without betraying the alloy."

"Do you mean that happiness can never be pure gold?"

"Sometimes I have tried to do so, but it has always been unsatisfactory. I have often wondered what became of the waves of sound which music sets in motion. It has come to me now. They

for help, nor one of terror, but of agony. Roberta sprung to her feet and gazed upward, while a riderless horse, dashed up the path.

"I told Louis Valois to have a care of that beast, or he would play him an

Roberta stole softly out of the room. Fay was lying with closed eyes. The fixed look of horror had not left her face. She shivered when she heard Roberta's step, but did not open her eyes when she bent over her.

"Do not be afraid to look at me, dear," Roberta whispered; "I bring good news. He is not hurt—that is, not very badly—a bruise, the merest cut on the back of the head. He was conscious when I left him."

As she ceased speaking Fay broke in

trolled, that Roberta did not try to stop her. Rather, she wept, too, but the tears scorched her eyes and cheeks as they fell. For a long time neither spoke a word, until Fay, gathering herself out of Roberta's arms, said:

"If Louis had been dead I should never have wept again, never.'

For all answer Roberta leaned over and kissed the tear-stained face. As she did so a scarlet rose fell from her hair, scattering its petals all over the white of Fay's dress.

(Conclusion next month.)

THE

HE written thoughts of our ancestors are a rich legacy, to which we are heirs by right of our humanity. But how many are those thoughts! Let us dismiss, for the time, the beauties of books, and turn our attention to a single aspect of literature-namely, its unwieldy bulk.

The Library of the British Museum contains upward of half a million volumes. The Imperial Library of Paris contains more than a million volumes.

When we hear of a million, or any other large number, we are apt to suppose that we can conceive of the amount. We hear so much of millions of dollars nowadays, that many of us fancy ourselves quite able to think of the amount, and even to have it. But the learned tell us that this is not the case-that is to say, that we can not conceive of the magnitude. Read what an eminent writer says, endeavoring to convey some idea of a million:

"Permit me to add a word upon the magnitude of a million, it being a number so enormous as to be difficult to conceive. It is well to have a standard by which to realize it. Mine is as follows: One sum

mer day I passed the afternoon in Bushey Park to see the magnificent spectacle of its avenue of horsechestnut trees, a mile long, in full flower. As the time passed, it occurred to me to try to count the number of spikes of flowers facing the drive on one side of the long avenue. I mean all the spikes visi

ble in full sunshine on one side of the road. Accord

ingly I fixed upon a tree of average bulk and flower,

and drew imaginary lines-first halving and then quartering the tree, and so on, until I arrived at a subdivision that was not too large to admit of my counting the spikes of flowers it included. I did this with three different trees, and arrived at pretty much the same results. As well as I can recollect the three

estimates were as nine, ten, eleven. Then I counted the trees in the avenue, and multiplied all together. I found the spikes to be just 100,000 in number.

"Ever since then, whenever a million is mentioned I recall the long perspective of the avenue of Bushey Park, with its stately chestnuts clothed from top to

bottom with spikes of flowers, bright in the sunshine,

and I imagine a similarly continuous floral band of ten miles in length."

Let the reader, by the help of this or of any other standard, endeavor to realize the magnitude of a million, and then reflect that the immense mass of books is always on the increase. Most of our books do not date beyond the fourteenth century. Some fragments of the learning of the ancients have been preserved to us, but nothing like what was lost nor like what we have gained since. And