observed that gentleman, apparently much impressed by her mature proportions, "and it seems like only the other day that you were seven years old, and used to kiss me when we met." "Well, I'll kiss you again," replied the saucy Rose, adding after a moment's pause,--"when I am seven years old." "I warn you, Mrs. Elmsley," said Edward, shaking his head with doleful foreboding, "that girl knows how to look like the innocent flower she is named after, and be the serpent under it." "Did you know," said his slandered sister, addressing the same lady, and indicating the pair she had basely forsaken, "those are the very two that were with me when I was so badly hurt last summer. Do you wonder that I am glad to escape from them?" The party drove off amid jests and laughter, while the young ladies, applying their lips once more to a leaf of grass-ribbon each had in her hand, produced such sounds as, according to their father, might, Orpheus-like, have drawn stones and brickbats after them, but from a murderous rather than a magnetic motive. "I wonder if Rose is really nervous," said Edward, breaking the silence that bound them after the departure of the others. "I think she is really nonsensical," said Rose's friend, not very blandly. "Are you then so sorry to be left alone with me?" The young lady evaded the question, but became extremely loquacious. She intimated that almost any companionship, or none at all, could be endured on this beautifully melancholy autumn day, and called his attention to the leaves underfoot, which had grown brown and ragged, like the pages of a very old book on which the centuries had laid their slow relentless fingers. In a burst of girlish confidence she told him that always, after the wild winds had stripped from the shuddering woodland its last leaves, and the pitiless rains had washed it clean, the spectacle of bare-branched trees, standing against the gentle gloom of a pale November sky, reminded her of a company of worldings, from whom every vestige of earthly ambition, pride and prosperity had fallen away. "Anything," she said to herself, "_anything_ to keep the talk from becoming personal." "I can understand that," said Edward, "but the influences of unworldliness--I was almost saying other-worldliness--are nowhere felt as in the woods. Sometimes they exert a strange spell upon me. The petty pride and shallow subterfuges of fashionable life are impossible in nature's solitudes. Don't you think so?" "Yes;" assented Helene, not seeing whither her unthinking acquiescence