Great stretches of sunshine lay on the garden and in it brilliant beds of flowers glowed with their richest lights, poppies folded their gorgeous robes closely about them, Arab fashion, to keep out the heat; hollyhocks stood in their stateliness flecked with changing shadows from the aspen tree near by.  Beds of tiger lilies, pinks, larkspur, sweetwilliams, canterbury bells, primroses, gillyflowers, lobelia, bloomed in a luxuriance that the methodical box which bordered them could not restrain.  But the garden was by no means a blaze of sunshine, for ash trees, maples, elms, and varieties of the pine were there.  Trumpet-vines climbed on the wall, and overtopping that, caught at trellises prepared to receive them, and formed screens of shadows that flickered in every breeze and changed their places with the changing sun.  But it was only with a passing glance that the visitor saw these things, his eyes were fixed upon an arbor at the end of the garden; it was covered with clematis, while two great elms met overhead at its entrance and shaded the path to it for a little distance.  Under these elms stood a group of young people.  He was unannounced, and had opportunity without being himself perceived, to scan this little group as he went forward.  His expression varied with each member of it, but showed an interest of some sort in each.  Now it was full of passionate delight; then it changed as his look fell upon a tall young man with dark eyes and a bearing that in its most gracious moments seemed unable to lose a touch of haughtiness, but whose face now was alive with a restful joy.  The gazer, as he perceived this happiness, so wanting in himself, scowled with a bitter hate and looked instantly toward another of the party, this time with an expression of triumph.  At the fourth and last member of the group his glance though scowling, was contemptuous; but the receiver was as unconscious of contempt as he felt undeserving of it.  From him the gazer’s eyes returned to the person at whom he had first looked.  She was standing on the step of the arbor, an end of the clematis vine swaying lightly back and forth over her head, and almost touching her bright hair which was now towered high in the fashion of the day.  She was holding a spray of the vine in her hand.  She had fastened one end in the hair of a young lady who stood beside her, and was now bringing the other about her neck, arranging the leaves and flowers with skilful touches.  Three men, including the new-comer, watched her pretty air of absorption, and the deftness of her taper fingers, the sweep of her dark lashes on her cheek as from the height of her step she looked down at her companion, the curves of her beautiful mouth that at the moment was daintly holding a pin with which the end of the spray was to be fastened upon the front of the other’s white dress.  It was certainly effective there.  Yet none of the three men noticed this, or saw that between the two girls the question as to beauty was a question