There was a moment of silence, after she ceased speaking, during which Katherine began to be conscious that the atmosphere was becoming charged with an unaccustomed element, and she hastened to observe, as she glanced towards the veranda: 

“How lovely the house is looking!  Have you your camera here?”

“I am sorry I have not, for we ought to have some views of it.  We will have,” he added.  “I will have a photographer from the village come up before the day is over and take some.”

As he concluded, by some careless handling, the picture of the Flower Carnival slipped from his grasp, and in trying to recover it his arm came in contact with the box, which Katherine had taken from her treasure closet, displacing the cover and almost upsetting it.

“Oh!” cried the girl, in a startled tone, but flushing scarlet as she saved it from falling and hastily replaced the cover.  She was not quick enough, however, to prevent her companion seeing, with a sudden heart bound of joy, that the box contained a spray of dried and faded moss rosebuds.

He turned a radiant face to her, and her eyes drooped in confusion before the look in his, while the color burned brighter in her cheeks.

“Miss Minturn—­Katherine!  Did you prize them enough to keep them—­ here?” and he touched the door of her “treasure closet”

“They are a—­a souvenir of a delightful evening—­my last at Hilton,” she faltered.

His countenance fell; yet something in the tense attitude of the figure beside him, in her quickened breathing and fluctuating color emboldened him to ask: 

“Did they convey no message to you? had they any special significance?  Tell me—­tell me, please!”

“They had not—­then,” she confessed, almost inaudibly.

“Then?” he repeated, eagerly.

“I did not know—­I had not looked—–­”

“You did not know their language then; but you do now, dear?” he said, a glad ring in his tones.  “And may I tell you that my heart and all its dearest hopes went with those little voiceless messengers?  That was Why—­”

“Oh!  Uncle Phillip, the carriage has come for us and we are waiting for you,” cried Dorothy’s voice from the low, open window on the opposite side of the room, and for the first time in his life a feeling of impatience with his niece stirred in Phillip Stanley’s heart.  “Why! is anything the matter?” she added, as she observed Katherine’s averted eyes and unusual color and her uncle’s unaccustomed intensity.

“I’ll be with you in a minute, Dorrie,” he said.  “Just one word,” he pleaded, bending nearer to Katherine, “have you treasured my messengers because of their message?”

But Katherine could not speak even the “one word”—­the fluttering of her startled heart, the throbbing in her throat robbed her of the power to make a sound.  The most she could do was to lift her eyes, for one brief instant, and smile faintly into the fond face looking down upon her.  It was enough, however.  Phillip Stanley stood erect and drew in a long, free breath.