Lisbeth looked out into the garden, where the two stood together, Georgie blushing and smiling, as fresh and flower-like herself as any of Miss Clarissa’s many blossoms, Hector talking to her eagerly, his eyes full of pleasure in her beauty and youth.

“Fond of her?” she said, abstractedly. “Who is not fond of her?”

“But,” suggested Miss Hetty, “we mean fond of her in—in a different way.”

She had laid her hand on Lisbeth’s shoulder, and, as she spoke, she thought she felt a slight start; but the girl’s voice was steady enough when she spoke the next minute.

“Oh!” she said, laughing a little, “you mean that he is in love with her. I have no doubt you are right, though—though I had scarcely thought of that. Men are always in love with somebody; and if he is in love with Georgie, it does him great credit. I did not think he had the good taste.”

But the fact was, that the idea was something 133 like a new light dawning upon her. Actually she had been so blind as not to think of this. And it had been before her eyes day after day!

“You have been an idiot,” was her unceremonious mental comment upon her own stupidity. “You have thought so much of yourself, that you have seen nothing. It is Hector Anstruthers who has touched her heart. She doubted either herself, or him, when she was ‘not so happy.’ And this is the end of it—the end of it. Good!”

Perhaps she was relieved, and felt more comfortable, for she had never been more amusing and full of spirit than she had appeared when she joined the couple in the garden.

The twilight had been falling when she left the house; and when the soft dusk came on, they still loitered in the garden. The air was warm and balmy. Miss Clarissa’s flower beds breathed forth perfume; the murmur of the waves upon the beach crept up to them; the moon rose in the sky, solemn, watchful, and silver-clear.

“Who would care to go back to earth, and parlors?” said Georgie. “This is Arcadia—silent, odorous, and sweet. Let us stay, Lisbeth.” 134

So they sauntered here and there until they were tired, and then they found a resting-place, under a laburnum tree; and Anstruthers, flinging himself upon the grass, lay at full length, his hands clasped under his head, watching Lisbeth, in newly stirred bitterness and discontent.

Discontent? Ah! what discontent it was. What bitterness! To-night it reached its climax. Was he a man, indeed, or had he gone back to boyhood, and to that old folly upon which his youth had been wrecked? Moonlight was very becoming to Lisbeth. It gave her colorless face the white of a lily leaf, and her great eyes a new depth and shadow. She looked her best, just now, as she had a habit of looking her best, at all inopportune and dangerous times.

Georgie, leaning, in a luxury of quiet dreaming, against the trunk of the laburnum, broke in upon his mental plaints, by speaking to her friend.

“Sing, Lisbeth,” she said. “You look as if you were in a singing mood.”

Lisbeth smiled, a faint smile not unlike moonlight. She was in a singing mood, but she was in a fantastic, half-melancholy mood, too. Perhaps this was why she chose a rather 135 melancholy song. She folded her hands upon her knees, in that favorite fashion of hers, the fashion Anstruthers remembered so well, and began;
“All that I had to give I gave—
Good-by!
Yet Love lies silent in the grave,
And that I lose, which most I crave,
Good-by! Good-by! Good-by!
“Nay! turn your burning eyes away!
Good-by!
It comes to this—this bitter day,
That you and I can only say,
Good-by! Good-by! Good-by!
“The rest lies buried with the past!
Good-by!
The golden days, that sped so fast,
The golden days, too bright to last;
Good-by! Good-by! Good-by!
“The fairest rose blooms but a day,
Good-by!
The fairest Spring must end with May,
And you and I can only say,
Good-by! Good-by! Good-by!”

“Ah, Lisbeth!” cried Georgie, when she stopped. “What a sad thing! I never heard you sing it before.”

“No,” answered Lisbeth. “I don’t think 136 anybody ever heard me sing it before. It is an imitation of a little German song I have heard, or read, somewhere. I can’t remember where, indeed. I can remember nothing but that the refrain of ‘Good-by’ haunted me; and the words I have just sung grew out of it.”

Anstruthers said nothing. He had watched her face, as she sung, and had almost lost control over himself, as he was often on the verge of doing lately. What a consummate actress the girl was! The mournful little song had fallen............