cceeded in turn
by utter despair! His sole occupation now was revisiting the spots which
he had frequented with her in that happy year. As one who has lost a
princely fortune sits down at length to enumerate the little items of
property that happen to be attached to his person, disregarded before
but now his all, so Randall counted up like a miser the little store of
memories that were thenceforth to be his all. Wonderfully, the smallest
details of those days came back to him. The very seats they sat in at
public places, the shops they entered together, their promenades and the
pausing-places on them, revived in memory under a concentrated inward
gaze like invisible paintings brought over heat.

One afternoon, after wandering about the city for some hours, he turned
into a park to rest. As he approached his usual bench, sacred to him
because Ida and he in the old days had often sat there, he was annoyed
to see it already occupied by a pleasant-faced, matronly looking German
woman, who was complacently listening to the chatter of a couple of
small children. Randall threw himself upon the unoccupied end of the
bench, rather hoping that his gloomy and preoccupied air might cause
them to depart and leave him to his melancholy reverie. And, indeed, it
was not long before the children stopped their play and gathered timidly
about their mother, and soon after the bench tilted slightly as she
relieved it of her substantial charms, saying in a cheery, pleasant
voice:--

"Come, little ones, the father will be at home before us."

It was a secluded part of the garden, and the plentiful color left her
cheeks as the odd gentleman at the other end of the bench turned with
a great start at the sound of her voice, and transfixed her with a
questioning look. But in a moment he said:--

"Pardon me, madame, a thousand times. The sound of your voice so
reminded me of a friend I have lost that I looked up involuntarily."

The woman responded with good-natured assurances that he had not at all
alarmed her. Meanwhile Randall had an opportunity to notice that, in
spite of the thick-waisted and generally matronly figure, there were,
now he came to look closely, several rather marked resemblances to Ida.
The eyes were of the same blue tint, though about half as large, the
cheeks being twice as full. In spite of the ugly style of dressing it,
he saw also that the hair was like Ida's; and as for the nose, that
feature which changes least, it