ven such nice escorts as the Dillinghams are," he solaced, recovering
himself. "We college folk are a sorry lot."

But when she was gone, the mood for composition which an hour before had
seemed so near had escaped him, and he put away his books and
manuscript, standing for a while, a little chilled in mind and body,
before the grate and looking at the photograph on the mantel. While he
did so the haunting likeness he had seen grew more distinct and by
degrees another face overspread that of his young daughter, the face of
the sister he had loved and lost.

With a sudden impulse he crossed the room to an old-fashioned mahogany
secretary, opened its slanting lid, and unlocking with some difficulty a
small inner drawer, returned with it to his desk. Several packages of
letters tied with faded ribbon filled the small receptacle, but they
struck upon him with the strangeness of something utterly forgotten. The
pieces of ribbon had once held for him each its own association of time
or place; now he could only remember, looking down upon them with tender
gaze, that they had been Stella's, worn in her hair, or at her throat or
waist. Simple and inexpensive he saw they were. Arnoldina would not have
looked at them.

Overcoming something of reluctance, he took one of the packages from its
place. It contained the letters he had found in her writing-table after
her death, most of them written after she had come to Vaucluse by her
stepmother and the friends she had left in the village. He knew there
was nothing in any of them she would have withheld from him; in reading
them he was merely taking back something from the vanished years which,
if not looked at now, would perish utterly from earth. How affecting
they were--these utterances of true and humble hearts, written to one
equally true and good! His youth and hers in the remote country village
rose before him; not now, as once, pinched and narrow, but as salutary,
even gracious. He could but feel how changed his standards had become
since then, how different his measure of the great and the small of
life.

Suddenly, as he was thus borne back into the past, the old sorrow sprang
upon him, and he bowed before it. The old bitter cry which he had been
able to utter to no human consoler swept once more to his lips: "Oh,
Stella, Stella, you died before I really knew you; your brother, who
should have known and loved you best! And now it is too late, too
late."

He sent out as o