“Dear me! what an alarmingly refulgent person you depict!” laughed Maria Dolores, her eyes still on the wall.

“I have no gift for word-painting,” said John; “though I doubt if the words are yet invented that could fitly paint my lady.  She grows in beauty day by day.  It’s a literal fact—­every fresh time I see her, she is perceptibly more lovely than the last, more love-compelling in her loveliness.  But ’tis a thing unpaintable, indescribable, as indescribable as the perfume of a rose.  Oh, why haven’t I five thousand a year?”

“You harp so persistently upon your desire for money,” suggested Maria Dolores, “one might infer she was a commodity, to be bought and sold.  You begin at the wrong end.  What good would five or fifty thousand a year do you, if you had not begun by winning her love?

“No, I begin at the proper end, worse luck,” John answered, glooming.  “For, without a decent income, I have no right even to try to win her love.

“And that being so,” questioned Maria Dolores, “I hope you conscientiously avoid her society, or, when you meet, make yourself consistently disagreeable to her?

“There’s no need for such precautions,” John replied.  “There’s no fear for her.  She regards me as a casual and passing acquaintance.  So I make myself no more disagreeable than I am by nature.  And if I avoided her society, (which I am far from doing), it would be not for her sake, but for my own.  For, though her society is to me a kind of anticipation of the joys of Heaven, yet when I leave it and find myself alone, the reaction is dreary in the superlative degree; and the fear, which perpetually haunts me (for I know nothing of her plans), lest I shall never see her again, is agonizing as a foretaste of—­Heaven’s antipode.  Oh, I love her!”

He took, involuntarily I dare say, a step in her direction.  She retreated under the vaulting of the porte-cochere.

“You seem,” she commented, “to be getting a good deal of emotional experience,—­which doubtless some day you will find of value.  Why not, instead of gardener, embark as novelist or poet?  Here is material you could then turn to account.”

“Ah, there you are,” he complained, piteously, “mocking me again.  Ah, well, if you must have your laugh, have it, and welcome.  A man can learn to take the bitter with the sweet.”

“To spare you that discomfort,” said she, moving deeper into the archway, while John’s face fell, “I will bid you good-bye.  I am to report, then, that you decline my friend’s invitation with thanks?”

“With my most grateful thanks,” he was able intensively to rejoin, in spite of his dismay at the imminence of her departure.

“And for a very special reason?” she harked back, now, suddenly, for the first time since they had touched thin ice, giving him a glance.

It was the fleetingest of fleeting glances, it was merry and ironic, but there was something in it which brought a flame to his blue eyes.