of
a low and vulgar community, and the conventional restraints of a
hypocritical society,--when two souls in perfect accord met and mingled
in poetical union, then--but here the colonel's speech, which had been
remarkable for a certain whiskey-and-watery fluency, grew husky, almost
inaudible, and decidedly incoherent. Possibly Mrs. Tretherick may have
heard something like it before, and was enabled to fill the hiatus.
Nevertheless, the cheek that was on the side of the colonel was quite
virginal and bashfully conscious until they reached their destination.

It was a pretty little cottage, quite fresh and warm with paint, very
pleasantly relieved against a platoon of pines, some of whose foremost
files had been displaced to give freedom to the fenced enclosure in
which it sat. In the vivid sunlight and perfect silence, it had a new,
uninhabited look, as if the carpenters and painters had just left it. At
the farther end of the lot, a Chinaman was stolidly digging; but there
was no other sign of occupancy. "The coast," as the colonel had said,
was indeed "clear." Mrs. Tretherick paused at the gate. The colonel
would have entered with her, but was stopped by a gesture. "Come for me
in a couple of hours, and I shall have every thing packed," she said,
as she smiled, and extended her hand. The colonel seized and pressed it
with great fervor. Perhaps the pressure was slightly returned; for the
gallant colonel was impelled to inflate his chest, and trip away as
smartly as his stubby-toed, high-heeled boots would permit. When he had
gone, Mrs. Tretherick opened the door, listened a moment in the deserted
hall, and then ran quickly up stairs to what had been her bedroom.

Every thing there was unchanged as on the night she left it. On the
dressing-table stood her bandbox, as she remembered to have left it
when she took out her bonnet. On the mantle lay the other glove she had
forgotten in her flight. The two lower drawers of the bureau were half
open (she had forgotten to shut them); and on its marble top lay her
shawl-pin and a soiled cuff. What other recollections came upon her I
know not; but she suddenly grew quite white, shivered, and listened with
a beating heart, and her hand upon the door. Then she stepped to the
mirror, and half fearfully, half curiously, parted with her fingers the
braids of her blonde hair above her little pink ear, until she came upon
an ugly, half-healed scar. She gazed at this, moving her pretty he