his braggart air, she thought. The Tudor castle grew dim in her vision.

"What do you think of the bubble, Miss Harned?" he went on. "Goes like
a bird, don't she?"

"Indeed she does," answered Millicent, characteristically making
immediate atonement in voice and look for the mental criticism of the
moment before. "It's really going like a bird. I don't suppose we
shall ever have a sensation more like flying."

"Not until our celestial pinions are adjusted," said Anna. Brockton
laughed, but Millicent went on:

"Seriously, the loveliest belief I ever lost was the one in the wings
with which my virtues should be at last rewarded. To breast the ether
among the whirling stars,--didn't you ever lie awake and think of the
possibility of that, Anna?"

"Never! I'm no poet in a state of suffocation, as I sometimes suspect
you of being."

"As for heaven," declared Brockton, "I don't take much stock in all
that. We're here--we know that--and we'd better make the most of it.
For all we know, it's our last chance to have a good time. Better take
all that's coming to you here and now, Miss Harned, and not count much
on those wings of yours."

Millicent smiled mechanically. Could any Elizabethan garden of delight
compensate for the misery of having each butterfly of fancy crushed
between Lemuel Brockton's big hands in this fashion?