“They are in my room upstairs.  They are too sacred for use.”

“Who ever heard of such a sentimental brother!” she said, turning abruptly away.

Mrs. Wheaton was their companion now, and she soon gave the final touches to a delicate little supper, which, with some choice flowers, she had placed on the table.  It was her purpose to wait upon them with the utmost respect and deference, but Mildred drew her into a chair, with a look that repaid the good soul a hundred times for all the past.

“Roger,” she said gayly, “Mrs. Wheaton says you don’t eat much.  You must make up for all the past this evening.  I’m going to help you, and don’t you dare to leave anything.”

“Very well, I’ve made my will,” he said, with a smiling nod.

“Oh, don’t talk that way.  How much shall I give the delicate creature, Mrs. Wheaton?  Look here, Roger, you should not take your meals in a library.  You are living on books, and are beginning to look like their half-starved authors.”

“You are right, Miss Millie.  ’Alf the time ven I come to take havay the thinks I finds ‘im readin’, and the wittles ’ardly touched.”

“Men are such foolish, helpless things!” the young girl protested, shaking her head reprovingly at the offender.

“I must have some company,” he replied.

“Nonsense,” she cried, veiling her solicitude under a charming petulance.  “Roger, if you don’t behave better, you’ll be a fit subject for a hospital.”

“If I can be sent to your ward I would ask nothing better,” was his quick response.

Again she was provoked at her rising color, for his dark eyes glowed with an unmistakable meaning.  She changed the subject by saying, “How many pretty, beautiful, and costly things you have gathered in this room already!  How comes it that you have been so fortunate in your selections?”

“The reason is simple.  I have tried to follow your taste.  We’ve been around a great deal together, and I’ve always made a note of what you admired.”

“Flatterer,” she tried to say severely.

“I wasn’t flattering—­only explaining.”

“Oh dear!” she thought, “this won’t do at all.  This homelike house and his loneliness in it will make me ready for any folly.  Dear old fellow!  I wish he wasn’t so set, or rather I wish I were old and wrinkled enough to keep house for him now.”

Conscious of a strange compassion and relenting, she hastened her departure, first giving a wistful glance at the serene faces of those so dear to her, who seemed to say, “Millie, we have found the home of which you dreamed.  Why are not you with us?”

Although she had grown morbid in the conviction that she could not, and indeed ought not to marry Roger, she walked home with him that night with an odd little unrest in her heart, and an unexpected discontent with the profession that heretofore had so fully satisfied her with its promise of independence and usefulness.  Having spent an hour or two in her duties at the hospital, however, she laughed at herself as one does when the world regains its ordinary and prosaic hues after an absorbing day-dream.  Then the hurry and bustle of the few days preceding her graduation almost wholly occupied her mind.