of doors. You are like a flower to me, just bursting into beautiful bloom. Better still, a wonderful fruit, which in some sheltered spot has grown unplucked to a rich tinted ripeness. You are so much a part of nature, so utterly unartificial, that it seems I must see you and enjoy you first in a setting of nature's own."
This was the frankest acknowledgment of her beauty and its appeal to him that John had ever made. It seemed to Bessie that he made it now rather unconsciously; but she saw that he felt it and was moved by it. To see this gave her another delicious thrill of happiness. Indeed her girlish breast was all a-tremble with joys, with curiosities, with expectancies. She, too, felt something wonderful and intoxicating in this slight physical contact of her lover's fingers. She felt herself upon the verge of new and mysterious discoveries and recognized the naturalness of the instinct to meet them under the vaulted blue with the warm sun shining and the tonic breezes blowing past.
"Your impulse is right, John," Bessie answered, with quick assent and an energetic double shake of the hands that held her own, and they went out into the sunny street.
Not far from the Mitchell residence, on the western hills of Los Angeles, is a little, painted park, with a maple-leaf sheet of water embanked by closely shaved terraces of green, and once or twice a clump of shrubbery crouching so close over graveled walks as to suggest the thrill of something wild. From one of these man-made thickets a toy promontory juts into the lake. Upon this point, as if it were a lighthouse, is a rustic house, octagonal in shape, with benches upon its inner circumference. Embowered at the back, screened half way on the sides, and with the open lake before, this snug structure affords a delicious sense of privacy and elfin-like seclusion, pro-
