me by'm'by. Won't you? I'll
be so pleased when you come!"

"Yes, Druse," whispered Miss De Courcy, "I promise."

And then the terrible form that had been Druse sat up in bed with a
mighty effort, and turned its sightless eyes joyfully toward Miss De
Courcy's tear-stained face.

"It's morning! I can see you!" it said, and fell back into the faithful
arms and upon the faithful breast.

And so Druse, not having lived and died in vain, passed away forever
from the Vere De Vere.

A LAMENTABLE COMEDY.

I stood one July noon on the platform of the desolate station at
Wauchittic, the sole passenger waiting for the stage. The heat was
quivering in the air. I watched the departing train, whirling like a
little black ball down the narrow yellow road, cut between the green
fields, and was vaguely glad that I was not going to the end of the
Island on it. This was somewhere near the middle, and it was quite far
enough from civilization.

The village, like so many Long Island villages, was distant from the
railroad. Only one or two farm-houses were in sight. There was hardly a
sound in the hot noonday air, now that the train had gone, except the
whistling of a cheerful station agent, who sat in the window of the
little oven-like Queen Anne structure, in his shirt sleeves, looking out
at me with lively interest. I had sought for a quiet country place in
which to finish my novel, the book which would decide beyond doubt
whether I had a future as a writer, or whether I was doomed to sink to
the level of the ordinary literary hack, for into it I had put, I knew,
all that was my best.

As I looked absently down the track, I reviewed the past winter months,
the long days and evenings spent at my desk in the stuffy little
lodgings to which I was limited by my narrow income, interrupted
frequently by invasions on various pretexts of the ill-fed chambermaid,
who insisted on telling me her woes, or by my neighbor from the next
room, the good little spinster, who always knocked to ask if she might
heat a flat-iron at my grate when I was in the midst of a bit of minute
description. She would sit down, too, would poor withered Miss Jane, in
my little rocking-chair to wait while the iron heated, and she said she
often told the landlady she did not know how I could write, I had so
many interruptions.

I had come to a place now, I thought, trying to quell the sense of
loneliness that oppressed me, as I looked around at the expanse