preferred to be operated on."

And Rudolph Musgrave noted, with a delicious tingling somewhere about
his heart, that her hair was really like the reflection of a sunset in
rippling waters,--only many times more beautiful, of course,--and that
her mouth was an inconsiderable trifle, a scrap of sanguine curves, and
that her eyes were purple glimpses of infinity.

Then he observed that his own mouth was giving utterance to divers
irrelevant and foolish sounds, which eventually resolved themselves into
the statement he was glad to see her. And immediately afterward the
banality of this remark brought the hot blood to his face and, for the
rest of the day, stung him and teased him, somewhere in the background
of his mind, like an incessant insect.

Glad, indeed!

Before he had finished shaking hands with Patricia Stapylton, it was
all over with the poor man.

"Er--h'm!" quoth he.

"Only," Miss Stapylton was meditating, with puckered brow, "it would be
unseemly for me to call you Rudolph--"

"You impertinent minx!" cried he, in his soul; "I should rather think it
would be!"

"--and Cousin Rudolph sounds exactly like a dried-up little man with
eyeglasses and crows' feet and a gentle nature. I rather thought you