had been thinking of that kind of thing) off the phlox.

"All the more reason, Stupid!" he said to the moth, as it flew away.
"A man goes and gets a girl to care for him, and then he goes and
plays some fool trick--like as not this chap had his sheet tied--and
leaves her alone the rest of her life. Just look at this sweet old
angel, will you? it's a shame. No, sir, no woman in mine, thank you!"

He paced again. The moth fluttered off in the gloom; fluttered back,
hovered, then settled once more on the milk-white phlox, which
glimmered like a fragrant ghost in the half-light. The perfume
rose from the flowers and mingled with the delicate scent of the
roses and the heavier breath of lilac and syringa.


"'Where I find her not, beauties vanish;
Whither I follow her, beauties flee.
Is there no method to tell her in Spanish"--


"Oh, I must be drunk!" said Doctor Geoffrey. He tried another path.
A new fragrance met him, the keen, clean, cruelly sweet smell of
honeysuckle. Browning was gone with the phlox and the roses; and what
was this coming unbidden into his head, crisp and clean and
possessing, like the honeysuckle?


"'Where e're she be,
That not impossible She
Who shall command my life and me"--