ddenly up out of the wilderness, and set me to thinking and try to
trouble me with questions about myself, and then steal away again
without stopping to help me to settle them. Is it fair?" She rose and
put out her hand, and he took it and held it for a moment, while they
stood looking at one another.

"I am coming back," he said, "and I will find that you have settled
them for yourself."

"Good-by," she said, in so low a tone that the people standing near
them could not hear. "You haven't asked me for it, you know, but--I
think I shall let you keep that picture."

"Thank you," said Clay, smiling, "I meant to."

"You can keep it," she continued, turning back, "because it is not my
picture. It is a picture of a girl who ceased to exist four years ago,
and whom you have never met. Good-night."

Mr. Langham and Hope, his younger daughter, had been to the theatre.
The performance had been one which delighted Miss Hope, and which
satisfied her father because he loved to hear her laugh. Mr. Langham
was the slave of his own good fortune. By instinct and education he
was a man of leisure and culture, but the wealth he had inherited was
like an unruly child that needed his constant watching, and in keeping
it well in hand he had become a man of business, with time for nothing
else.

Alice Langham, on her return from Mrs. Porter's dinner, found him in
his study engaged with a game of solitaire, while Hope was kneeling on
a chair beside him with her elbows on the table. Mr. Langham had been
troubled with insomnia of late, and so it often happened that when
Alice returned from a ball she would find him sitting with a novel, or
his game of solitaire, and Hope, who had crept downstairs from her bed,
dozing in front of the open fire and keeping him silent company. The
father and the younger daughter were very close to one another, and had
grown especially so since his wife had died and his son and heir had
gone to college. This fourth member of the family was a great bond of
sympathy and interest between them, and his triumphs and escapades at
Yale were the chief subjects of their conversation. It was told by the
directors of a great Western railroad, who had come to New York to
discuss an important question with Mr. Langham, that they had been
ushered downstairs one night into his basement, where they had found
the President of the Board and his daughter Hope working out a game of
football on the billiard table. The