"Then I shan't tell you. And I'm disappointed in you. Fred, dear," she continued softly, "I think there is one secret a true woman may keep from her husband: the name of another man who loved her. The pain that unwelcomed love causes her is soon forgotten in her own happiness. The other one does not forget so easily. It was his sorrow, it is his secret. For his sake she will let it live in his memory alone. Would I be dearer to you because I had been dear to others? Would I be less precious had others never valued me? No, Fred, we love our dear ones for what we find in them, not for what others see. If I had cared for someone else once, I should have told you. But there was no love in me until I met you, you are my earth, my sea, my sky. Sometimes I pray that you may not become my God! I love you. What does anything else matter? This is merely my way of looking at things. Everybody has a different view. But you'll humor me, won't you, sweetheart?"

"You are the purest, noblest woman that ever lived or ever will live!" cried Fred fervently, holding her closer and closer.

A light step and the opening of a door startled them.

"Go right on, don't mind me," said Miladi cheerfully, tossing her parasol into one chair, her gloves into another and her hat into a third.

"Miladi, where have you been?" demanded Fred and June in a breath.

"One at a time, please," answered Miladi, "Fred, you being a man, I cannot understand your vulgar curiosity. Therefore I shall ignore your question and answer your wife's. I have been to the Abbey."

"Not ever since we left you," said Fred.

"Yes, I have."

"Great goodness! Whatever have. you been doing?"

"Oh, dreaming, and thinking what I think."

"That's definite," said Fred.

"I began to wonder about you a long time ago," said June, “but Fred

"Interrupted you to kiss you," finished Miladi. "And he has been at it ever since."

"I was wondering," went on June, "if we ought to let you go about alone so much."

"Why, of course you ought," said Miladi.

"Of course we ought not," said Fred decidedly. "But what are we to do? We can't sit six hours in the same little corner,with a heaven-liesall-about us expression, dreaming and thinking what we think. It's absurd! And you won't come with us."

"I should hope not!" exclaimed Miladi, "A pleasant, comfortable feeling I'd have sitting here while you two murmured nursery rhymes. Why do people take wedding trips, I wonder? They never see anything but each other."

"Now, Miladi," exposulated Fred, "that's a libel. I see two small specks of soot on your chin this very instant. And this morning I saw a

blind man watch me furtively a minute, then make a beeline for me. I scowled at him and pointed towards a policeman, whereat the man turned quickly and went in the opposite direction."

Miladi laughed.

"If Bert were only here," she said, "we would have a detective story on 'Foxy Fritz, the Timorous Terror of the Troubled.' All this does not change the fact that you have been in making love when you ought to have been out."

"What is London to this!" said Fred, raising June's white hand to his lips.

"Listen to Benedict the married man," scoffed Miladi. "Last summer he heard Rob Jackson warbling sweet things into Mamie Jones's Maori-shell ear, and swore by the seven wives of Bluebeard that such an idiot ought to be run through a sausage machine."

"Mamie Jones and June are two different persons," evaded Fred. "So Rob thought," remarked Miladi slyly.

"For my part," said loyal Fred, "I wish all girls were like June.”

"So do not I," said June quickly. "You would have chosen one of my twin sisters, and where would I be?" "You two wear me to a frizzle," grumbled Miladi. "That kind of thing is all right in books, but out of them it's absolutely nauseating."

"Crosspatch, draw the latch, sit by the fire and spin,'" sang Fred. "Won't she set different words to her little tune some day!"

"Double bar," said Miladi.

Then they laughed the laugh that only ridiculous people indulge in.

"Let's have dinner and go somewhere," said Miladi.

"Why, you've just come in," exclaimed Fred.

"Oh, were you going to stay in all the evening?" asked Miladi, in a disappointed voice. "It isn't quite six yet, and I thought we could have dinner about half past and go out."

"So we can, little sister," said Fred quickly. "And we'll go anywhere you want to. Summer doesn't last forever. The wise pick flowers while they can. But the serious question is what are we going to have for dinner?"

"Anything that's good," said Miladi. "And lots of it. I'm famished."

"That's what you always say," Fred complained. "And then you eat two teaspoonfuls of dinner and a tubful of dessert."

"Ugh!" said Miladi, shuddering. "Serve your remarks in smaller quantities please. You've taken my appetite already."

"Then I'll take your share of the dessert," was the practical rejoinder. "Well, think up something so that we won't have to sit over the bill of fare more than twenty minutes. I'll have roast beef myself. June, I know will take chicken. What soup will you have?"

"It's too hot for soup," said Miladi. "I'll order," with a mischievous glance at her brother, “some

"Someday, someday, someday I shall

me chew,

Love I know not where or how, love I know not who or which,

Only this, only this, this that once you

loved me,

Only this, I love you now, I love you

no-o-ow.

Do, mi, sol, do."

دو

"Poultices," broke in Fred. "I'll get you a chicken salad, some green peas, celery, olives, nuts and raisins, strawberries and cream, bananas and assorted cakes. Will that do?"

"Very nicely, thank you.'

"Then I'll go and order while you pin up your hair. We haven't much time if we're going anywhere in particular."

"Where do you want to go?" June enquired. "I'm sure I don't know." "Ask Miladi," Fred said, "She always knows where she want's to go." "If it isn't too late to book seats, we'll go to see Irving's Robespierre,"

Miladi said.

"There didn't I tell you?" said Fred. "A good choice, too. "I'll telephone this minute. Don't be long coming down."

At the table he told them that he had been fortunate enough to get seats.

"So we have plenty of time to hear Miladi's little tale of what she thinks about what she thinks."

"I'm afraid I don't know how to tell it," Miladi sighed. "Every time I realize that I am in London-London-I go nearly mad with joy. Think of being right in the heart of this great world, and the happiest person in the heart! That is the way I feel. But this is what 1 thought of most today: In this busy never-still-a-minute London, how many breathing spots! And best among these, this: You go into the street with its endless line of people coming and going, coming and going. If you stand still, you are jostled; if you walk on, you are jostled. Still they come and go, come and go. Oh, if there were only some little corner to rest in for one moment! And even as the thought comes, your rest is there. You cross a stone step, open a door, and people and things are as though they never had been. Here is peace. The churches of England! How I love them! In busy thoroughfares, in the midst of homes, in quiet country meadows, in wretched alley-ways, in far away, unexpected places, they stand, century after century, stolid and mossy, waiting, waiting. Their doors are always open. Enter when you will, but leave not without one prayer.'

"And I think that your own life is like this city-noisy with the feet of

passions hurrying to and fro; full of discord, and gay laughters and piteous cries, and lulls of wakeful stillness, and lulls of heavenly calm. And it is the church in our heart that holds peace."

The girl paused and gazed dreamily through the open window, where the crowd was 'coming and going, coming and going.'

"Miladi, dear," her brother whispered gently, "You are forgetting your berries. Eat a little and don't talk any more."

"Why, Freddie, what is the matter? You look positively frightened whenever I speak seriously."

"I do feel a bit uncanny when you get that expression on," apologized Fred. "I'm always afraid you're going to die."

"Fred, Fred, you are too funny!" cried Miladi, choking with suppressed mirth. "I certainly shall die if you say anything like that again."

"I wish you hadn't interrupted, you stupid boy," said June. "She isn't in the slightest danger, and I like to hear her talk. Tell us the rest, Miladi."

"There is no rest for the wicked,” said Miladi. "But if you will be good, you shall hear what the 'bobby' told me."

"Oh, she has been falling in with a policeman again," said June.

"If you are seen with that fraternity much more," said Fred, "people will clutch their purses tighter when you pass.'

"The London policemen are a set of superior men," said Miladi loftily. "And this was an especially superior policeman. He told me about St. Paul's first. A long time ago there was a temple of Diana where it stands now. Then there was the old St. Paul's. Its spire was higher than the cross on the new building. It doesn't sound believable, does it? It was very much richer too in gold and silver and jewels. But it was desecrated greatly. All the idlers of

sweetest music, he of the pipes and keys, or he of the tiny pen? Which sings his way into the merriest hearts?

"The Abbey seems small after St. Paul's. I like largeness. All Americans do. But the Abbey has a gentleness, a picturesqueness peculiarlv its own. It has absorbed the individuality of the great ones lying within its walls, and buries you in it just as it buries their bodies in stone.

"In St. Paul's the people annoy you. In the Abbey, you forget that there are any people. Ah, me, the Abbey! I wish I had the words to describe it. But Washington Irving*

has done it so well that I suppose I don't need to. He could take away my words and make them sound better; but one thing he couldn't do," said Miladi, "and that is take away that indescribable something that fills me so full, so full, when I am there dreaming and thinking what I think."

"And another thing," she added. helping herself to a fig. "Great as all those dead men are, I wouldn't give my life for their fame. They are in the Abbey, so am I. I'd rather look down on them and then step out into sunshiny world of calling voices, lumbering old omnibuses, and the cab-bell's jingle. Wouldn't you?"