About this time he was engaged in writing Up the Rhine;

She was pale when she turned round to the courteously waiting boy. It was a very cold note, and she put it in her pocket to keep it warm. The rose she showed to Will, and told him the story of the sender.

"Didn't I tell you," he cried, when she had finished, "a doctor has the greatest opportunity in the world to be great--and a surgeon comes near it? I say, Miss Ruth, your Dr. Kemp must be a brick. Isn't he?"

"Boys would call him so," she answered, shivering slightly.

It was so like him, she thought, to fulfil Bob's request in his hearty, friendly way; she supposed he wanted her to understand that he wrote to her only as Bob's amanuensis, --it was plain enough. And yet, and yet, she thought passionately, it would have been no more than common etiquette to send a friendly word from himself to her mother. Still the note was not thrown away. Girls are so irrational; if they cannot have the hand-shake, they will content themselves with a sight of the glove.

And Ruth in the warm, throbbing, summer days was happy. She was not always active; there were long afternoons when mere existence was intensely beautiful. To lie at full length upon the soft turf in the depths of the small enchanted woods, and hear and feel the countless spells of Nature, was unspeakable rapture.

"Ah, Floy," she cried one afternoon, as she lay with her face turned up to the great green boughs that seemed pencilled against the azure sky, "if one could paint what one feels! Look at these silent, living trees that stand in all their grandeur under some mighty spell; see how the wonderful heaven steals through the leaves and throws its blue softness upon the twilight gloom; here at our feet nestle the soft, green ferns, and over all is the indescribable fragrance of the redwoods. Turn there, to your right, little artist, high up on that mountain; can you see through the shimmering haze a great team moving as if through the air? It is like the vision of the Bethshemites in Dore's mystic work, when in the valley they lifted up their eyes and beheld the ark returning. Oh, Floy, it is not Nature; it is God. And who can paint God?"

"No one. If one could paint Him, He would no longer be great," answered the girl, resting her sober eyes upon Ruth's enraptured countenance.

One afternoon Ruth took a book and Ethel over the tramway to this fairy spot. It was very warm and still. Mrs. Levice had swung herself to sleep in the hammock, and Mr. Levice was dozing and talking in snatches to the Tyrrells, who were likewise resting on the Levices' veranda. All Nature was drowsy, as Ruth wandered off with the little one, who chattered on as was her wont.

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