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“Did you never have a valentine, Miss Dolly ?” asked the young man, with a pleasant, fond sort of look at her, inspired, if truth must out, by the remembrance of Annetje’s delight at a certain red and gold missive he had sent her last year.

“No, Sir; I never did in the world,” pathetically answered Dolly, looking at him full with those wistful gold-brown eyes.

“What a pity !” he said, coolly, resolving then and there to send her one the very next week, but not to give her the least idea of it beforehand, or, indeed, ever, simply intending to give her a pleasure without being impertinent or even suggestive.

Forgive him for his caution. He had seen so much of conventional girls, and he did not even yet know Dolly. If he had— But according to the last and profanest punctuation of Shakspeare,

and our dear young parson

when he devised this pleasant surprise for his pretty parishioner. It was useless for him to try to find the valentine of the period in Basset; no shops there dabbled in the elegancies of life; and he did not quite like to send on to New York to a stationer, and run a doubtful chance of procuring the delicate, graceful sheet he would prefer to inscribe to Dolly. But being well drilled in all churchly ordinances and modern floriations of the good old establishment, he had in the theological seminary cultivated a native talent for drawing and a quick sense of color, for the purpose of illuminating prayer and psalm books and designing memorial windows. With a sort of meek contempt at his own folly, and a certain doubt if it were not bordering on sacrilege, he recalled his knowledge and betook himself to his study, hunted out paints, brushes, and gilding, locked the door, and sat down to illuminate with floral emblems a valentine.

Heaven save the mark! Had he been a mediæval saint, he would have suspected a present and mocking spirit guided his essaying hand, it would so persistently drift into ecclesiastical symbolism. Crosses, lambs, lilies, perked up at him at every turn, not because he was thinking of Dolly, for he was not, being repossessed for the time by an old-time effort to design a stained window for the seminary chapel. But at last the window retired into the past, and he presently achieved on a sheet of creamwhite paper a fit frame for some little verses, which seemed to him impersonal and vague enough, but rather pretty for the purpose. Taking it for granted, carelessly enough, that Dolly had never seen his handwriting, he inscribed the verses, without any attempt at disguise, in his own clear and elegant script, and sealing the thick, smooth envelope with wax after the good old respectful fashion, stamped the vermilion surface with a seal that had belonged to him in college, and was the motto of a secret society, the device being a rose on its stalk, and “Sub” cut beneath it in old English letters.

Things work together in this world more strangely than we know: the wind brings us hidden influences, the shower that keeps us from our way turns our life into a new channel, the very pebble on which we slip in the road may be the beginning of life or death to us, and the fact that Miss Alvira Peck sent home some linen she had been making up for Dolly in an old religions newspaper had in it an element of our little girl’s fate. She was lonely that day. Papa had gone to New York for a week, and Dolly was an idle little thing. When Roxy brought up the bundle of garments, she put them down in a chair, and being in a great hurry, for it was Monday, she did not see Dolly behind the long window-curtain, idly noting the industrious skips and chirps of a pair of chickadees on the near woodpile. Presently mademoiselle turned her head to see what Roxy had left; then she wanted to examine the work; and having approved its dainty perfection, she took up the paper to fold and dispose of it, when her eye fell on the title of a story in the “secu- lar” department. It was a valentine story, and in it the hero, being a shy youth, took the good saint for a patron and excuse, and told his love in earnest under cover of flowers and rhyme. Dolly was charmed with the bright little tale, and said to herself, with a long-drawn sigh, “I wonder—I wish—” and then a gentle bloom stole over the baby face; but words came no more; some flitting dream wrapped her in silvery mists, and possibilities floated about her like the saffron-tinged cloudlets that forebode dawn. It was the 12th of February to-day: one day more and it would be St. Valentine’s. What if—