I moved as in a dream.  Everything that wealth could lavish on a home was here.  I occupied Clara’s own room with her, and it seemed at night as if I lay in a fairy chamber; there were silken draperies of delicate blue, a soft velvety carpet whose ground was the same beautiful blue, covered with vines like veins traced through it, and massive furniture with antique carving, and everything in such exquisite taste, even to the decorated toilette set on the bureau.  Everything I thought was in perfect correspondence except the face on my lace-fringed pillow.  I seemed so sadly out of place.  I wondered if Clara was really contented with her humbly-furnished room at our house.  Callers came as she had predicted, and it was all in vain my trying to keep out of the sight of those “city people.”  Insisting on my presence, and knowing well I should escape to our room if left by myself, Louis was authorized to guard me, and I had no chance of escape; I felt myself an intruder upon his time, every moment until during the last evenings of my stay, when in the lighted parlors quite a happy company gathered.  I then had an opportunity of seeing a little of his thought, running as an undercurrent to his nature.  Clara had been singing with such sweetness of expression and pathetic emphasis, that my eyes were filled with tears of emotion.  Miss Lear, a young lady friend, followed her, and sang with such a shrill voice, such unprecedented flying about among the octaves, that it shocked me through every nerve, and I trembled visibly and uttered an involuntary exclamation of impatience.  Louis caught my hand, and the moment she ended, whispered: 

“Are you frightened?”

“Oh!” I said, “she is your guest, but where is her soul?”

“In heaven awaiting her, I suspect,” he replied, “but, Miss Emily, she is a fair type of a society woman.  I have just been thinking that to-morrow at sunset I hope to be among the birds and beneath the sky of your native town; one can breathe there; I am glad to go.”

“I don’t want you to go,” I said, impetuously (poor Emily did it).

He turned his full dark eyes upon me, and I felt the tide that flooded cheek and brow with crimson.

“Explain to me, Miss Emily,” he said, “you love to keep my mother there.”

“I did not mean to say it, Louis, but it is true.”

“Why true?”

“I am so sorry—­”

My dilemma was a queer one; I had to explain, and the tears that gathered when his mother sang, came back as I described our plain home.

“I love my home, it is good enough for me, I could not exchange it even with you, but you will think us rude, uncultivated people, I fear; you will find no attraction there; everything is as homely there as I am myself!”

And I never can forget how his bright, dark eyes grew humid with sympathy, to be covered with the sunlight of his smile at the earnest honesty of my remarks, especially the last one.