death
of Sassoon--the anniversary her mother kept?

She sat up in bed, trembling. Then she rose, and opening the door with
caution, crept down the stair, sliding her hot hand before her along
the cool polished banister. Only a subdued glimmer came through the
curtained windows, stealing in with the ever-present scent of the
arbors. It was so still she thought she could hear the very heart of the
dark beating. As she passed through the lower hall, a hound on the
porch, scenting her, stirred, thumped his tail on the flooring, and
whined. Groping her way to the dining-room, she lighted a candle and
passed through a corridor into a low-ceilinged chamber employed as a
general receptacle--a glorified garret, as Mrs. Dandridge dubbed it.

It showed a strange assemblage! A row of chests, stored with winter
clothing, gave forth a clean pungent smell of cedar, and at one side
stood an antique spinet and a worn set of horsehair furniture. Sofa and
chairs were piled with excrescences in the shape of old engravings in
carved ebony frames, ancient scrap-books and what-not, and on a table
stood a rounded glass case with a flat base--the sort in which an older
generation had been wont to display to awestruck admiration its
terrifying concoctions of wax fruit.

Shirley had turned her miserable eyes on a book-shelf along one wall.
The volumes it contained had been her father's, and among them stood a
row of tomes taller than their fellows--the bound numbers of a county
newspaper, beginning before the war. The back of each was stamped with
the year. She was deciphering these faded imprints. "Thirty years ago,"
she whispered; "yes, here it is."

She set down the candle and dragged out one of the huge leather-backs.
Staggering under the weight, she rested its edge on the table and began
feverishly to turn the pages, her eye on the date-line. She stopped
presently with a quick breath--she had reached May 15th. The year was
that of the duel: the date was the day following the jessamine
anniversary. Fearfully her eye overran the columns.

Then suddenly she put her open hand on the page as though to blot out
the words, every trace of color stricken from cheek and brow. But the
line seemed to glow up through the very flesh: "_Died, May 14th; Edward
Sassoon, in his twenty-sixth year_."

The book slipped to the floor with a crash that echoed through the room.
It was true, then! It _was_ Sassoon's death that her mother mourned. The
man in wh