parting injunctions;
but her last two years at the old _pension_ had been very precious to
her. Grace Pelham was her room-mate, and Grace Pelham's loving arms had
opened to her when, motherless and heart-broken, Marion Sanford had
returned from the second year's summer vacation. Between the two girls
there had gradually grown a deep and faithful friendship, born of mutual
respect and esteem. It would be saying too much to assert that at first
there had been no differences. Four years at one school give
opportunities which are illimitable, but the present writer knew neither
of them in the bread-and-butter period, and was properly reproved by the
one and snubbed by the other when, in the supposed superiority of his
years and co-extensive views on the frangibility of feminine friendship,
he had sought to raise the veil of the past and peer into the archives
of those school-days. Partly from school-mates and partly from
observation the author formed his opinion of what Marion Sanford had
been as an undergraduate. What she became the candid reader must judge
for ----self.

For a woman she was reticent to a marked degree in discussing the faults
and foibles of others. She was slow to anger, loath to believe ill of a
man or woman, truth-loving, sincere, and simple-hearted. She had not
been the most studious girl at school. Deep down in her heart of hearts
she had a vein of romance that made the heroes of fiction the idols of a
vivid imagination. Wilfrid of Ivanhoe, Sir Galahad, Launcelot, William
Wallace, Bayard, Philip Sidney, were men whom she fondly believed to
have existed in other shapes and names time and again, and yet she was
staggered in her faith because the annals of our matter-of-fact days
told no such tales as those she loved of knighthood and chivalry.
Once--once she had found a modern hero. Heaven only knows to what a wild
worship would not that brief dream have expanded had she not seen him.
He was the elder brother of one of her friends at school,--a navy
officer,--a man who when his ship was cut down by a blundering Briton,
and sent to the bottom with over a hundred gallant hearts high-beating
because "homeward bound," he, the young ensign, gave his whole strength,
his last conscious minute to getting the helpless into the lowered
boats, and was the last man in the "sick-bay" before the stricken ship
took her final plunge, carrying him into the vortex with a fevered boy
in his strong young arms. Both were un