never stayed away so long before. In the spring the Ledoux had gone
to Europe; Claire seemed to be falling into a decline; her sight seemed
to be failing, and her father said she must see a famous doctor and have
a change of air.

"Mr. Falconer came back in May," continued the good lady, "as if he
expected to find them. But the house was shut up and nobody knew just
where they were. He seemed to be all taken aback; it was queer if
he didn't know about it, intimate as he had been; but he never said
anything, and made no inquiries; just seemed to be waiting, as if there
was nothing else for him to do. We would have told him in a minute, if
we had anything to tell. But all we could do was to guess there must
have been some kind of a quarrel between him and the Judge, and if there
was, he must know best about it himself.

"All summer long he kept going over to the house and wandering around
in the garden. In the fall he began to paint a picture, but it was very
slow painting; he would go over in the afternoon and come back long
after dark, damp with the dew and fog. He kept growing paler and weaker
and more silent. Some days he did not speak more than a dozen words,
but always kind and pleasant. He was just dwindling away; and when the
picture was almost done a fever took hold of him. The doctor said it was
malaria, but it seemed to me more like a trouble in the throat, a kind
of dumb misery. And one night, in the third quarter of the moon, just
after the tide turned to run out, he raised up in the bed and tried to
speak, but he was gone.

"We tried to find out his relations, but there didn't seem to be any,
except the Ledoux, and they were out of reach. So we sent the picture
up to our cousin in Brooklyn, and it sold for about enough to pay Mr.
Falconer's summer's board and the cost of his funeral. There was nothing
else that he left of any value, except a few books; perhaps you would
like to look at them, if you were his friend?

"I never saw any one that I seemed to know so little and like so well.
It was a disappointment in love, of course, and they all said that he
died of a broken heart; but I think it was because his heart was too
full, and wouldn't break.

"And oh!--I forgot to tell you; a week after he was gone there was a
notice in the paper that Claire Ledoux had died suddenly, on the last
of August, at some place in Switzerland. Her father is still away
travelling. And so the whole story is broken off and w