have rejoiced to offer it. But this serene and gentle woman was
far too wise to wring any promise from the boy, although, indeed,
she had no opportunity, for at that moment Mr. Ferguson knocked
on the green door between the two gardens and asked if he might
come in and smoke his cigar in his neighbor's garden. "I'll smoke
the aphids off your rose-bushes," he offered. "You are very
careless about your roses!"

"A 'bad tenant'?" said Mrs. Richie, smiling. And poor Blair
picked himself up, and went sulkily off.

But Mrs. Richie's flattering assumption that Blair and she looked
at things in the same way, and David's apparent indifference to
Elizabeth's emotions, made the childish love-affair wholesomely
commonplace on both sides. By mid-September it was obvious that
the prospect of college was attractive to Blair, and that the
moment of parting would not be tragic to Elizabeth. The romance
did not come to a recognized end, however, until a day or two
before Blair started East. The four friends, and Miss White, had
gone out to Mrs. Todd's, where David had stood treat, and after
their tumblers of pink and brown and white ice-cream had been
emptied, and Mrs. Todd had made her usual joke about "good-
looking couples," they had taken two skiffs for a slow drift down
the river to Willis's.

When they were rowing home again, the skiffs at first kept
abreast, but gradually, in spite of Miss White's desire to be "at
her post," and David's entire willingness to hold back, Blair and
Elizabeth appropriately fell behind, with only a little shaggy
dog, which Elizabeth had lately acquired, to play propriety. In