sunken cheeks, a prominent nose,
heavy eyebrows, and a high forehead rather scantily streaked by
gray hair. There was no trace of the girlish bloom I had known,
of the beauty that once had been hers, but the imperious manner
of the woman was unmistakable.

"Mary," I began jocularly, "I have come to apologize."

She thrust the lamp forward, peered into my face, and said, with
not the faintest trace of a smile or the slightest evidence of
embarrassment:

"Why, that's all right, Johnny Stanhope. I accept your apology.
Come right in."

I went in. We sat in the sitting-room and talked of our
school-days and our fortunes. I told her how I had gone down to
the city, how I had prospered, of my adventures in the world, of
my marriage--dealing very gently with my relations with the late
Mrs. Stanhope--of my bereavement and present idyllic existence.
And she told me of herself, how she had lived on and on in the
little cottage, caring only for the support and education of her
niece, Phyllis Kinglake, an orphan for nearly twenty years. "You
remember Sylvia?" she said, with the first touch of emotion.

Did I remember Sylvia? My little fair-haired playmate with the
large eyes and the blue veins showing through the delicate beauty
of her face? Little Sylvia, who first won my boyish affection,
and with whom I made a solemn contract of marriage when we were
only seven years old? Did I not remember how I would pass her
house on my way to school, and stand at the gate and whistle
until she came shyly out, with her face as red as her little hood
and tippet, and give me her books to carry, and protest with the
ever present coquetry of girlhood that she thought I had gone
long ago? Could I ever forget how I saved my coppers, one by one,
until I had accumulated a sum large enough to buy a whole
cocoanut, which I presented to her in the proudest moment of my
life, and how the other girls tossed their heads with the
affectation of a sneer, and with pretended indifference to this
astonishing stroke of fortune? And that fatal evening when I
provoked my little beauty's wrath, and in all the receding
opportunities of "Post-Office" and "Copenhagen" she had turned
her face and rosy lips away from me, until the world was black
with a hopeless despair? And the singing-school where she was our
shining ornament, and that blissful night when I stood up with
her in the village church, while we sang our duet descriptive of
the special virtues of s