anger to Ida, but
the relation which she claimed to sustain to her was one that had never
before been realized between living persons on earth, however it might
be, in heaven.

"Do you understand?" said Paul.

"I--think--I--do. But how--strange--it is!" she replied, in lingering
tones, her gaze continuing to rest, as if fascinated, upon Miss
Ludington.

The latter's face expressed a great elation, an impassioned tenderness
held in check through fear of terrifying its object.

"I do not wonder it seems strange," she said, very softly. "You have yet
no evidence as to who I am. I remember you--oh, how well!--but you cannot
remember me, nor is there any instinct answering to memory by which you
can recognize me. You have a right to require that I should prove that I
am what I claim to be; that I am also Ida Ludington; that I am your later
self. Do not fear, my darling. I shall be able to convince you very
soon."

She made Ida sit down, and then went to an ancient secretary, that stood
in a corner of the room, and unlocked a drawer, the key to which she
always carried on her person.

Paul remembered from the time he was a little boy seeing her open this
drawer on Sunday afternoons and cry over the keepsakes which it
contained.

She took out now a bundle of letters, a piece of ribbon, a locket, a
bunch of faded flowers, and a few other trifles, and brought them to Ida.

Paul left the room on tiptoe. This was a scene where a third person, one
might almost say a second person, would be an interloper.

When, a long time after, he returned, Miss Ludington was sitting in the
chair where Ida had been sitting, smiling and crying, and the girl, with
eyes that shone like stars, was bending over her, and kissing the tears
away.

The night was now almost spent, and the early dawn of midsummer, peering
through the windows, and already dimming the lights, warned them that the
day would soon be at hand.

"You shall have your own bedroom," said Miss Ludington. The face of the
old lady was flushed, and her high-pitched and tremulous voice betrayed
an exhilaration like that of intoxication. "You will excuse me for having
cluttered it up with my things; to-morrow I will take them away. You see
I had not dared hope you would come back to me. I had expected to go to
you."

"I and you--you and I." The girl repeated the words after her, slowly, as
if trying to grasp their full meaning as she uttered them. Then a sudden
terror leap