"And in what season may this rhyming fancy touch us?" she asked.
"Enlighten me, Monsieur."

He smiled, responsive to her merry mood, and his courage ever
swelling under the suasion of it, he answered her in a fearless,
daring fashion that was oddly unlike his wont. But then, he was
that day a man transformed.

" It comes, Mademoiselle, upon some spring morning such as this -
for is not spring the mating season, and have not poets sung of it,
inspired and conquered by it? It comes in the April of life, when
in our hearts we bear the first fragrant bud of what shall anon
blossom into a glorious summer bloom red as is Love's livery and
perfumed beyond all else that God has set on earth for man's delight
and thankfulness."

The intensity with which he spoke, and the essence of the speech
itself, left her a moment dumb with wonder and with an
incomprehensible consternation, born of some intuition not yet
understood.

"And so, Monsieur, the Secretary," said she at last, a nervous
laugh quivering in her first words, "from all this wondrous verbiage
I am to take it that you love?"

"Aye, that I love, dear lady," he cried, his eyes so intent upon her
that her glance grew timid and fell before them. And then, a second
later, she could have screamed aloud in apprehension, for the book
of Jean Jacques Rousseau lay tumbled in the grass where he had flung