is
indeed a beautiful boy, a dreamer, yet manly. A boy I call him, yet
he is twenty-nine. My dear father had four sons and a daughter at
his age. Still he is a boy. It is strange in this generation, Augusta,
that though in many ways they seem so advanced, so beyond us, in others
they are further away from life's responsibilities than we were at their
age. There is a suggestion of his Uncle William about Mark, but he is
somehow stronger, more imperative. I was drawn to him at once because
of his music. And he has the charming manner, the almost excessive
chivalry, toward our sex that we see so little of any more, or at least
seldom encounter at our age. Lucretia had asked Stella in for tea. She
is a dear child and quite alarmingly composed, but not altogether
musical, despite her excellent musical opportunities. She played one
of the boy's songs, a delicious thing, rather dreadfully. I felt sorry
for him. Lucretia insisted upon my playing his "Youth and Crabbed Age,"
which every one has been singing, although he seems delightfully unaware
of that fact. He was so courteous about insisting that I should play
more, I ran through a bit of "Meistersinger,"--he seemed so truly a
young _Walther_,--and then discovered another little song that he has
not published, "Too Late for Love and Loving," full of a kind of pathos
that it seems impossible youth could understand. But I suppose that is
where genius comes in.

The rest of the letter was made of messages and the mild, small daily
occurrences that are of moment to such as Miss Augusta Penfield.

That night, searching in an old secretary in his room for some missing
notes, Mark came upon a little daguerreotype in a drawer. It was of a
young girl, taken apparently in the late sixties or early seventies.
Something in the face, clear-eyed, warm-lipped, trusting, caught and
held his attention. He turned it over to see if the girl's name was on
the back, but the only inscription was a date in his Uncle William's
writing, June, 1863. Poor Uncle William, who had been so full of
promise, they said, but who had died from a bullet wound, a sacrifice to
his country two years after the war!

Some girl that his uncle had loved, perhaps. The young man's face,
dark-eyed, romantic, familiar to him through the old picture in
uniform always on his mother's dressing-table, rose before his mind's
eye. Perhaps Uncle William had taken the little picture away with him
to the war. The date must hav