reason why they should be, then you may be very confident that you are
wrong, and that they are in love, for the secret of love is past
finding out. Why our cousin should have loved the gay Flora so
ardently was hard to say; but that he did so, was not difficult to
see.

He went away to college. He wrote the most eloquent and passionate
letters; and when he returned in vacations, he had no eyes, ears, nor
heart for any other being. I rarely saw him, for I was living away
from our early home, and was busy in a store--learning to be
book-keeper--but I heard afterward from himself the whole story.

One day when he came home for the holidays, he found a young foreigner
with Flora--a handsome youth, brilliant and graceful. I have asked
Prue a thousand times why women adore soldiers and foreigners. She
says it is because they love heroism and are romantic. A soldier is
professionally a hero, says Prue, and a foreigner is associated with
all unknown and beautiful regions. I hope there is no worse reason.
But if it be the distance which is romantic, then, by her own rule,
the mountain which looked to you so lovely when you saw it upon the
horizon, when you stand upon its rocky and barren side, has
transmitted its romance to its remotest neighbor. I cannot but admire
the fancies of girls which make them poets. They have only to look
upon a dull-eyed, ignorant, exhausted _roue_, with an impudent
moustache, and they surrender to Italy to the tropics, to the
splendors of nobility, and a court life--and--

"Stop," says Prue, gently; "you have no right to say 'girls' do so,
because some poor victims have been deluded. Would Aurelia surrender
to a blear-eyed foreigner in a moustache?"