en the
lines of suffering so marked upon the face beside him as that night.
Something evidently had reopened the old wound, causing it to throb
anew.

"I need not ask what has brought you back into the mountains at this
time of year and in this storm," Darrell remarked, as his friend
concluded.

For answer Mr. Britton drew from his pocket an envelope which Darrell
at once recognized as a counterpart of one which had come to him some
weeks before, but which he had laid away unopened, knowing only too well
its contents.

"I am particularly glad, for Miss Underwood's sake, that you are here,"
he said; "she feared you might not come, and it worried her."

"Which accounts for the importunate little note which accompanied the
invitation," said Mr. Britton, with a half-smile; "but I would have made
it a point to be present in any event; why did she doubt my coming?"

"Because of the season, I suppose, and the unusual storms; then, too,"
Darrell spoke with some hesitation, "she told me she believed you had a
sort of aversion to weddings."

"She was partly right," Mr. Britton said, after a pause; "I have not
been present at a wedding ceremony for more than twenty-five years--not
since my own marriage," he added, slowly, in a low tone, as though
making a confession.

Darrell's heart throbbed painfully; it was the first allusion he had
ever heard the other make to his own past, and from his tone and manner
Darrell knew that he himself had unwittingly touched the great, hidden
sorrow in his friend's life.

"Forgive me!" he said, with the humility and simplicity of a child.

"I have nothing to forgive," Mr. Britton replied, gently, fixing his
eyes with a look of peculiar affection upon Darrell's face. "You know
more now, my son, than the whole world knows or has known in all these
years; and some day in the near future you shall know all, because, for
some inexplicable reason, you, out of the whole world, seem nearest to
me."

A few moments later he resumed, with more of his usual manner, "I am not
quite myself to-night. The events of the last few days have rather upset
me, and," with one of his rare smiles, "I have come to you to get
righted."

"To me?" Darrell exclaimed.

"Yes; why not?"

"I am but your pupil,--one who is just beginning to look above his own
selfish sorrows only through the lessons you have taught him."

"You over-estimate the little I have tried to do for you; but were it
even as you say, I wo