ays
gone by. So he made his way, going with unerring step, beneath the
overbranching of copper-beech, lilac, and red may, to the
flower-carpeted wilderness where, with bluebells about its roots and
feathery foliage waving high around its trunk, stood that silver
birch-tree upon whose smooth bark he had long ago carved his name.

WHEN DEEP SLEEP FALLETH

Ten days of honeymooning passed in a big hotel at Brighton. Ten days of
feeling himself--he who, living, a man of wealth, in a small provincial
town, was used to find himself talked about, looked up to, considered
on every side--curiously unimportant and of no account. Then back with
his bride to the imposing if somewhat gloomy-looking old house to which
a dozen years ago he had brought home his first wife.

They had left Brighton early in the morning, and reached home as the
winter's afternoon was closing in. In the drawing-room, where many a
time she had seen his wife perform that office, the Bride poured out
tea for him.

"At last," he said, and stood upon the rug before the fire, cup in
hand, and smiled at her. "This is pleasant, isn't it?"

With a smile up at him, and a full glance of the dark melancholy eyes
he so much admired, she let him know that indeed she thought it
pleasant.

Her costly fur coat, one of his wedding-gifts to her, was tossed over
the back of her chair; the firelight gleamed on heavy gold ornaments at
wrists and throat. She had been a poor woman, clothing, not dressing,
herself, till in her eight-and-thirtieth year all the fine things which
money could buy were suddenly lavished upon her. So soon the feminine
mind accustoms itself to that change! Every woman is born to fine
raiment, meant to be softly swathed, richly decked, daintily tired.
Cheated of her inheritance though she be, it is as natural to her as
her own skin when at length she comes into it. The Bride felt a sense
of well-being, but no strangeness.

The room in which she sat was perhaps a little overcrowded with
beautiful things. In the days which were past, which she did not
trouble too much to remember, she had sat here on Sunday
afternoons--her one holiday, and always spent with the good-natured
wife of the man she had married--and had told herself that the room
bore too evident stamp of the wealth of the master of the house, and
the too sumptuous tastes of the mistress. Yet, now that it was her own,
so desirable in itself seemed each piece of furniture, so beaut