ied fields, and through the carpeted woods, and all
among the richly tinted bracken. One day he was told she was dead, and
that he must never speak her name; but he spoke it all the day and all
the night,--Beryl, nothing but Beryl,--and he looked for her in the
fields and in the woods and among the bracken. It seemed as if he had
unlocked the casket of his heart, closed for so many years, and as
if all the memories of the past and all the secrets of his life were
rushing out, glad to be free once more, and grateful for the open air of
sympathy.

"Beryl was as swift as a deer!" he exclaimed. "You would have laughed
to see her on the moor. Ah, it was hard to give up all the thoughts of
meeting her again. They told me I should see her in heaven, but I did
not care about heaven. I wanted Beryl on earth, as I knew her, a merry
laughing sister. I think you are right: we don't forget; we become
resigned in a dead, dull kind of way."

Suddenly he said, "I don't know why I have told you all this. And yet it
has been such a pleasure to me. You are the only person to whom I could
have spoken about myself, for no one else but you would have cared."

"Don't you think," she said gently, "that you made a mistake in letting
your experiences embitter you? Because you had been unlucky in one or
two instances it did not follow that all the world was against you.
Perhaps you unconsciously put yourself against all the world, and
therefore saw every one in an unfavourable light. It seems so easy to
do that. Trouble comes to most people, doesn't it? And your philosophy
should have taught you to make the best of it. At least, that is my
notion of the value of philosophy."

She spoke hesitatingly, as though she gave utterance to these words
against her will.

"I am sure you are right, child," he said, eagerly.

He put his hands to his eyes, but he could not keep back the tears.

"I have been such a lonely old man," he sobbed; "no one can tell what a
lonely, loveless life mine has been. If I were not so old and so tired I
should like to begin all over again."

He sobbed for many minutes, and she did not know what to say to him of
comfort; but she took his hand within her own, and gently caressed
it, as one might do to a little child in pain. He looked up and smiled
through his tears.

"You have been very good to me," he said, "and I dare say you have
thought me ungrateful. You mended my coat for me one morning, and not a
day has passe