gn himself to despair.

Suddenly he started with an exclamation that was almost a cry. What was
it? He remembered that, more than two years ago, on the last day he had
been with her, he had begged the copy of a duet which they sometimes
sang. It was in manuscript, and he desired to have it written out by her
own hand. He had before petitioned, and she promised it; and when he
thus again spoke of it, she laughed, and said, "What a memory it is, to
be sure! I shall have to tie a bit of string on my finger to refresh
it."

"Is that efficacious?" he had asked.

"Doubtless," she had replied, searching in her pocket for a scrap of
anything that would serve.

"Will this do?" he then queried, bringing forth a coil of gold wire
which he had been commissioned to buy for some fanciful work of his
mother.

"Finely," she declared; "it is durable, it will give me a wide margin,
it will be long in wearing out."

"Nay, then, you must have something more fragile," he had objected.

At that they both laughed, as he twisted a fragment of it on the little
finger of her right hand. "There it is to stay," he asserted, "till your
promise is redeemed." That was the last time he had seen her till
to-day.

Now, sitting, thinking of the interview just passed, suddenly he
remembered, as one often recalls the vision of something seemingly
unnoticed at the time, that, upon her right hand, the little finger of
the right hand, there was a delicate ring,--a mere thread,--in fact, a
wire of gold; the very one himself had tied there two years ago.

In an instant, by one of those inexplicable connections of the brain or
soul, he found himself living over an experience of his college youth.

He had been spending the day in Boston with a dear friend, some score of
years his senior; a man of the rarest culture, and of a most sweet and
gentle nature withal; and when evening came they had drifted naturally
to the theatre,--the fool's paradise it may be sometimes, but to them on
that occasion a real paradise.

He remembered well the play. It was Scott's _Bride of Lammermoor_. He
had never read it, but, before the curtain rose, his friend had
unfolded the story in so kind and skilful a manner as to have imbued him
as fully with the spirit of the tale as though he had studied the book.

What he chiefly recalled in the play was the scene in which Ravenswood
comes back to Emily long after they had been plighted,--long after he
had supposed her faithl