marry me?"
"I'll tell the aunt I live with to ask you to dinner."
"But will you marry me?"
"I thought you wished me to cheat my horoscope?"
"How could you find a better means of doing so?"
"What! if I should marry Louis Leczinski—?"
"Oh, to be sure. You will have it that I was Louis Leczinski. But, on that subject, I must warn you seriously—"
"One instant," she interrupted. "People must look other people straight in the face when they're giving serious warnings. Look straight into my eyes, and continue your serious warning."
"I must really warn you seriously," said he, biting his lip, "that if you persist in that preposterous delusion about my being Louis Leczinski, you'll be most awfully sold. I have nothing on earth to do with Louis Leczinski. Your ingenious little theories, as I tried to convince you at the time, were absolute romance."
Her eyebrows raised a little, she kept her eyes fixed steadily on his—oh, in the drollest fashion, with a gaze that seemed to say "How admirably you do it! I wonder whether you imagine I believe you. Oh, you fibber! Aren't you ashamed to tell me such abominable fibs—?"
They stood still, eyeing each other thus, for something like twenty seconds, and then they both laughed and walked on.
I hold it truth with him who weekly sings
Brave songs of hope,—the music of "The Sphere,"—
That deathless tomes the living present brings:
Great literature is with us year on year.
Books of the mighty dead, whom men revere,
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