strand of her hair that played along the contours of brow and head
changed his merriment to reverence and bade his heart recognize how
infinitely distant from his was her thought. Hilary Kincaid! can you
read no better than that?

Her thought was of him. Her mind's eye saw him on his homeward ride. It
marked the erectness of his frame, the gayety of his mien, the dance of
his locks. By her inner ear she heard his horse's tread passing up the
narrow round-stone pavements of the Creole Quarter, presently to echo in
old St. Peter Street under the windows of Pontalba Row--one of which was
Flora's. Would it ring straight on, or would it pause between that
window and the orange and myrtle shades of Jackson Square? Constance had
said that day to Miranda--for this star-gazer to overhear--that she did
not believe Kincaid loved Flora, and the hearer had longed to ask her
why, but knew she could not tell. Why is a man's word. "They're as
helpless without it," the muser recalled having very lately written on a
secret page, "as women are before it. And yet a girl can be very hungry,
at times, for a why. They say he's as brave as a lion--why is he never
brave to me?"

So futilely ended the strain on the remembered page, but while his
unsuspected gaze abode on her lifted eyes her thought prolonged the
note: "If he meant love to-night, why did he not stand to his meaning
when I laughed it away? Was that for his friend's sake, or is he only
not brave enough to make one wild guess at me? Ah, I bless Heaven he's
the kind that cannot! And still--oh, Hilary Kincaid, if you were the
girl and I the man! I shouldn't be on my way home; I'd be down in this
garden--." She slowly withdrew.

Hilary, stepping back to keep her in sight, was suddenly aware of the