“For I am rich, Rosamond,” he said hurriedly, before, in her surprise, she could speak.  “I have not cared for money, and I believe I have a great deal.  You shall do what you will with it, and with me.  We will travel:  you shall see the Old World, with all its wonders.  And I will shield you:  you shall never know a trouble or a care that I can take on myself; for—­I love you.”

Then, as she remained silent, too much astonished to speak, he said beseechingly,—­

“You do love me a little?  You could not come to me as you do, with all your little cares and perplexities, if you did not:  could you?”

“But I came just so to papa,” she said, finding voice at last; and her childish face grew perplexed and troubled.

The professor had no answer for that.  He hid his face in his hands.  In a moment her arms were about his neck, her kisses were falling on his hands.

“You have been so good to me,” she cried, “and I am making you unhappy, ungrateful wretch that I am!  Of course I love you; of course I will marry you.  Take away your hands and look at me—­Paul!”

Ah, well! they tell in fairy-stories of the fountain of youth, and even amid the briers of this work-a-day world it is found sometimes, I think, by the divining-rod of Love.  But many students gnashed their teeth, and, as we have said, Miss Christina Eldridge alone, of all the dear five hundred, said, “What possessed him?”

II.

The summer vacation was over, and students, more or less reluctantly, had returned to college and academy.  The professor came back in a brand-new and very becoming suit of clothes; his hair and beard had been trimmed by a fashionable barber, and his old-fashioned high “stock” exchanged for a modern scarf, in the centre of which gleamed a modern scarf-pin.  He ran lightly up the steps of the academy and inquired for Miss May.  Courtesy, as his uneasy conscience told him, dictated an inquiry for Miss Eldridge also, but he compounded with conscience:  he would ask to see her after he had seen Rosamond.

“Why, how very nice you look!  You are really handsome!” And the dignified professor was turned about, as if he had been a graven image, by two soft little hands, which he caught in his own, and—­so forth.

She was very sure now that she loved him, as in a certain sense she did.  But she would not consent to an immediate marriage, nor to the building of a miniature palace for her reception.  She owed it to Miss Eldridge, she said, to fulfil her engagement and not to go away just as she was beginning to be really useful.  And as for a house, would it not be pleasanter to live in lodgings and be free to come and go as they would?  So his wishes, as usual, were deferred to hers.  The long fall evenings began, and he brought, at her request, carefully-selected “improving” books, to be interrupted, as he read, by earnest questions, such as,—­