Page:The Diothas, or, A far look ahead (IA diothasorfarlook01macn).pdf/260

 tible, start she gave upon becoming aware that I was standing beside her, I was vain enough to imagine that I had not been without a share in her revery, and was proportionately encouraged by the thought.

"I was thinking," she began hurriedly, then paused, as if seeking for the best expression for her thought.

"Of restoring my property?" said I, pointing to the sprig of eglantine she held in her hand.

"It was not of that I was thinking," said she, with a slightly nervous little laugh. "I am quite willing, however, to restore your property, though you seem very careless of it. I found it on the ground, where you had dropped it, or perhaps thrown it away."

"Will you not restore it now?" said I, seeing that she made no movement to hand over the little half-withered sprig, to which I now attached an importance altogether disproportioned to its intrinsic value; that is, could I but obtain it from her own hand.

"You would probably only lose it again. I will place it in water, then you will find it quite fresh when you go home."

As she stood there, the hand that held the coveted sprig behind her, looking so provokingly defiant, so bewitchingly perverse, not only did her strange likeness to some one formerly known become almost tangible, but I also experienced a feeling as unaccountable as irresistible, of having on some former occasion passed through, and with her, a precisely similiar experience.

"O Reva, Reva!" I exclaimed passionately, hurried on, as it were, by a power beyond myself. "Do you not see what it is to me to receive that symbol from your