Ah, well! they tell in fairy-stories of the fountain of youth, and even amid the briers of this work-a-day world it is found sometimes, I think, by the divining-rod of Love. But many students gnashed their teeth, and, as we have said, Miss Christina Eldridge alone, of all the dear five hundred, said, "What possessed him?"
II.
The summer vacation was over, and students, more or less reluctantly, had returned to college and academy. The professor came back in a brand-new and very becoming suit of clothes; his hair and beard had been trimmed by a fashionable barber, and his old-fashioned high "stock" exchanged for a modern scarf, in the centre of which gleamed a modern scarf-pin. He ran lightly up the steps of the academy and inquired for Miss May. Courtesy, as his uneasy conscience told him, dictated an inquiry for Miss Eldridge also, but he compounded with conscience: he would ask to see her after he had seen Rosamond.
"Why, how very nice you look! You are really handsome!" And the dignified professor was turned about, as if he had been a graven image, by two soft little hands, which he caught in his own, and—so forth.
She was very sure now that she loved him, as in a certain sense she did. But she would not consent to an immediate marriage, nor to the building of a miniature palace for her reception. She owed it to Miss Eldridge, she said, to fulfil her engagement and not to go away just as she was beginning to be really useful. And as for a house, would it not be pleasanter to live in lodgings and be free to come and go as they would? So his wishes, as usual, were deferred to hers. The long fall evenings began, and he brought, at her request, carefully-selected "improving" books, to be interrupted, as he read, by earnest questions, such as,—
"Would you embroider this linen dress with its own color or a contrasting one, if you were me?"
Spring came again, and the professor, looking ten years younger than he had looked a year ago, brought to his "rose of all the world" a bunch of the first May roses.
"Oh, the lovely, lovely things!" she exclaimed delightedly. "You shall have two kisses for them, Paul. Where did they come from, so early in May?"
"From the south side of the wall of an old garden which I used to weed when I was a boy."
"Will you take me there? Is it near here?" she asked eagerly.