to be
mastered. Like the blue plush the photograph was faded, as were alas,
the roses in Persis' cheeks. It was twenty years since they had kissed
each other good-by in that very room, boy and girl, sure of themselves
and of the future. Justin was going away to make a home for her, and
Persis would wait for him, if need be, till her hair was gray.

He had been unfortunate from the start. Up in the garret, spicy with
the fragrance of dried herbs and of camphor, were his letters, locked
away in a small horse-hair trunk. Twice a year Persis opened the trunk
to dust the letters, and sometimes she drew out the contents of a
yellowing envelope and read a line here and there. These were the
letters over which she had wept long, long before,--blurred in places
by youth's hot tears, the letters she had carried on her heart. They
were full of the excuses in which failure is invariably fertile,
breathing from every page the fatal certainty that luck would soon turn.

The letters became infrequent after old Mr. Ware's "stroke." Persis
understood. For them there could be no thought of marrying nor giving
in marriage while the old man lay helpless. All that Justin could
spare from his scant earnings, little enough, she knew, must be sent
home. And meanwhile Joel having discovered in a three months' illness
his fitness to play the part of invalid, had apparently decided to make
the role permanent. Like many another, Persis had found in work and
responsibility, a mysterious solace for the incessant dull ache at her
heart.

That was twenty years before. Persis Dale, climbing the stairs as
nimbly as if it were early morning and she herself just turned sixteen,
seemed a woman eminently practical. Yet in the changes of those twenty
years, though trouble had been a frequent guest under the sloping roof
of the old-fashioned house and death had entered more than once, there
had never been a time when Persis had gone to her bed without a good
night to the photograph in the blue plush frame, never a morning when
she had begun the day without looking into the eyes of her old lover.

The most practical woman that ever made a button-hole or rolled a
pie-crust, despite a gray shimmer at her temples and a significant
tracery at the corners of her eyes, has a chamber in her heart marked
"private" where she keeps enshrined some tender memory. At the core,
every woman is a sentimentalist.

CHAPTER II

THE LOVER

Thomas Ha