semblance to suggest to a casual observer that they were pictures of
the same individual.

To trace the gradual process of change from year to year during the
intervening period, was an employment which never lost its pensive
fascination for Miss Ludington. For each of these faces, with their so
various expressions, represented a person possessing a peculiar identity
and certain incommunicable qualities--a person a little different from
any one of those who came before or after her, and from any other person
who ever lived on earth.

As now the grey head and the golden head bent together over one picture
after another, Miss Ludington related all she could remember of the
history and personal peculiarities of the original.

"There is, really, not much to say about them," she said. "They lived
very quiet, uneventful lives, and to anybody but us would, doubtless,
seem entirely uninteresting persons. All wore black dresses, and had sad
faces, and all found in their thoughts of you the source at once of their
only consolation and their keenest sorrow. For they fully believed--think
of it!--fully and unquestionably believed that you were dead; more
hopelessly dead than if you were in your grave, dead, with no possibility
of resurrection."

"This is the one," she said, presently, as she took up the picture of a
woman of thirty-five, "who had the fortune left to her, which has come
down to me. I want you to like her. Next to you I think more of her than
I do of any of the rest. It was she who cut loose from the old life at
Hilton which had become so sour and sad, and built this new Hilton here,
where life has been so much calmer, and, on the whole, happier, than it
had got to be at home. It was she who had the portrait of you painted
which is downstairs."

Ida took up a picture of the Miss Ludington of twenty-six or seven.

"Tell me something about her," she said. "What kind of a person was she?"

The elder woman's manner, when she saw what picture it was that Ida had
taken up, betrayed a marked embarrassment, and first she made no reply.

Noticing her confusion and hesitation, Ida said, softly, "Don't tell me
if it is anything you don't like to speak of. I do not care to know it."

"I will tell you," replied Miss Ludington, with determination. "You have
as good a right to know as I have. She cannot blame me for telling you.
She knows your secrets as I do, and you have a right to know hers. She
had a little escapade. Y