“It’s all there,” he said, after an awkward pause, seeing that she did not seem inclined to take any further notice of it.

“Of course it is.  Don’t I know that?”

“But you have not counted it.”

“No; but haven’t you said it was all there, and isn’t that enough?”

Phil unconsciously drew himself up, and a glad light shone in his eyes.  He was proud of her confidence in his word, and prouder still to feel himself not altogether unworthy of her good opinion.

“The time we have been here, and all the queer things that have happened to us since we left Oakdale, seems like a dream,” he said, presently—­“a strange, exciting dream.”

“Does it?” She looked up at him in undisguised surprise.  “It does not seem so to me; it is all real—­as real as my life, as the sea, as the earth—­but that is because I am a girl, I suppose, and girls are not so forgetful as boys are, so I’ve heard people say.”

You would never have thought her a child to look at her as she spoke.  Her eyes were so earnest, her voice so grave, her manner so composed and considering.

Her fun and prattle with Bess, her little quarrels and tart replies, her generous, happy, winning, self-willed ways, were as if they had never been, and in their place came resignation, reserve, pride and a little—­only a little—­regret and sorrow.

“I have something for you,” she said, after another awkward pause—­“something that will help you to remember me when I am gone.”

“Then I shall not need it,” said Phil, quickly.

“Oh, yes, you will!  You confess already that Florida, and all that’s happened to us since we’ve been here, seems like a dream—­so how can I hope to be remembered unless I leave some reminder of my naughty little self with you?  I asked Uncle Walter to get it made for me when we were last at Jacksonville, and he did, and here it is, and it’s yours to keep always, if you care for it, Phil.”

She took from her pocket, carefully wrapped in pink tissue paper, a purple velvet box, opened it and took from it a beautiful blue-and-gold enameled locket, set round with pearls, and as perfect in every respect as the jeweler’s art could make it.

“It has my picture in it.  I thought you might like to have it, though it’s not much, and I am nobody in particular.”

“Nobody?  Why, you are everybody to me, Lelia,” he said, taking the locket with a kind of reverent hesitancy and opening it with as much care as if he feared it might fall to pieces in his grasp or vanish entirely, like the enchanted ring in the fairy tale.

The lovely little face it portrayed was Lelia’s own, and when he had looked at it for fully five minutes, with eyes expressive of the most unbounded delight, he shut the glittering cases, replaced the locket in its little velvet box, and said, very earnestly: 

“The money I borrowed, and it’s now paid; but the picture is mine. Your gift, Lelia, and yours alone?”