nt civilities with a very assured brow. She neither
courts your society, nor avoids it. She does not seek to provoke any
special attention. And only when your old self glows in some casual
kindness to Nelly, does her look beam with a flush of sympathy.

This look touches you. It makes you ponder on the noble heart that lives
in Madge. It makes you wish it were yours. But that is gone. The fervor
and the honesty of a glowing youth is swallowed up in the flash and
splendor of the world. A half-regret chases over you at nightfall, when
solitude pierces you with the swift dart of gone-by memories. But at
morning the regret dies in the glitter of ambitious purposes.

The summer months linger; and still you linger with them. Madge is often
with Nelly; and Madge is never less than Madge. You venture to point
your attentions with a little more fervor; but she meets the fervor with
no glow. She knows too well the habit of your life.

Strange feelings come over you,--feelings like half-forgotten
memories,--musical, dreamy, doubtful. You have seen a hundred faces more
brilliant than that of Madge; you have pressed a hundred jewelled hands
that have returned a half-pressure to yours. You do not exactly admire;
to love you have forgotten; you only--linger!

It is a soft autumn evening, and the harvest-moon is red and round over
the eastern skirt of woods. You are attending Madge to that little
cottage-home where lives that gentle and doting mother, who, in the
midst of comparative poverty, cherishes that refined delicacy which
never comes to a child but by inheritance.

Madge has been passing the day with Nelly. Something--it may be the soft
autumn air, wafting toward you the freshness of young days--moves you to
speak as you have not ventured to speak, as your vanity has not allowed
you to speak before.

"You remember, Madge, (you have guarded this sole token of boyish
intimacy,) our split sixpence?"

"Perfectly;" it is a short word to speak, and there is no tremor in her
tone,--not the slightest.

"You have it yet?"

"I dare say I have it somewhere;"--no tremor now; she is very composed.

"That was a happy time;"--very great emphasis on the word happy.

"Very happy;"--no emphasis anywhere.

"I sometimes wish I might live it over again."

"Yes?"--inquiringly.

"There are, after all, no pleasures in the world like those."

"No?"--inquiringly again.

You thought you had learned to have language at command; you neve