INVOLUNTARY.

Six days of sunlight and clear air, of mornings as enchanting as
dreams, of dreams as full of magic as May mornings. Then an
interminable Sunday hot and sultry, with rolling purple clouds and an
evening of thunder and heavy showers. A magenta sunset, a night
working, hidden in its own darkness, its own secret purposes, and a
Monday morning gray beyond belief, with a soft steady rain.

Betty stood for full five minutes looking out at the straight fine
fall, at the white mist spread on the lawn, the blue mist twined round
the trees, listening to the plash of the drops that gathered and fell
from the big wet ivy leaves, to the guggle of the water-spout, the
hiss of smitten gravel.

"He'll never go," she thought, and her heart sank.

He, shaving, in the chill damp air by his open dimity-draped window,
was saying:

"She'll be there, of course. Women are all perfectly insensible to
weather."

Two mackintoshed figures met in the circle of pines.

"You have come," he said. "I never dreamed you would. How cold your
hand is!"

He held it for a moment warmly clasped.