ace with her hands and leaned against a tree.

It was Willie. There was no doubt of that; but not her Willie--the _boy_
Willie. It was true time had added but little to his height or breadth
of figure, for he was a well-grown youth when he went away. But six
years of Eastern life, including no small amount of travel, care,
exposure, and suffering, had done the work that time would ordinarily
have accomplished. The winning attractiveness of the boy had but given
place to equal, if not superior, qualities in the man, who was still
very handsome, and gifted with that natural grace and ease of deportment
which win universal commendation. The broad, open forehead, the lines of
mild but firm decision about the mouth, the frank, fearless manner,
were as marked as ever, and were alone sufficient to betray his identity
to one upon whose memory these and all his other characteristics were
indelibly stamped; and Gertrude needed not the sound of his well-known
voice, that too fell upon her ear, to proclaim to her beating heart that
Willie Sullivan had met her face to face, had passed on, and that she
was left alone, unrecognised, unknown, unthought of, and uncared for!

For a time this bitter thought, "He does not know me," was present to
her mind; it engrossed her entire imagination, and sent a thrill of
surprise and agony through her whole frame. She did not stop to reflect
upon the fact that she was but a child when she parted from him, and
that the change in her appearance must be immense. The one painful idea,
that she was forgotten and lost to the dear friend of her childhood,
obliterated every other recollection. Other feelings, too, soon crowded
into her mind. Why was Willie here, and with Isabel Clinton leaning on
his arm? How came he on this side the ocean? and why had he not
immediately sought herself, the earliest and, as she had supposed,
almost the only friend, to welcome him back to his native land? Why had
he not written and warned her of his coming? How should she account for
his strange silence, and the still stranger circumstance of his hurrying
at once to the haunts of fashion, without once visiting the city of his
birth and the sister of his adoption?

But among all her visions there had been none which approached the
reality of this painful experience that had suddenly plunged her into
sorrow. Her darkest dreams had never pictured a meeting so chilling; her
most fearful forebodings had never prefigured anythi