closet, half hidden by a well-worn party coat which
depended from the hook just above it. It was a mysterious-looking box,
delightfully suggestive of old love letters and tender fooleries of
that sort, or _would_ have been, had it not been the property of an
up-to-date, worldly-wise young woman who knew better than to save from
the flames such sources of delicious torment, such instruments of
exquisite torture.

In an instant Nancy had dragged the box to the door of the closet, and
was down on her knees in front of it, going through its contents with
ferret-like eagerness.

Yes! Her search was at last rewarded! For there, down under a pair of
white satin dancing slippers, in provokingly easy view, lay the much
desired finery.

She put her hand under the slippers to draw it from its resting place,
and as she felt the lace slip easily as though across some smooth
surface, looked with idle curiosity down into the box. Instantly a
sharp little cry rang through the room, and she withdrew her hand as
swiftly as though she had unearthed a nest of rattlers. Her face was
ashen, her breath came quick and short.

"Oh, I didn't know it was there!" she gasped. "I had forgotten all
about it. I thought it had been destroyed with all the rest. Why is it
left to torment me now, now, _now_?" she cried, angrily. Then, with a
swift revulsion of feeling, she murmured, brokenly: "Oh, Boy, Boy, is
there no escaping you? No forgetting you just when I am trying to so
hard?"

She sat very still for a moment. Then she put her hand into the box
again and drew out, not the precious scrap of rose-point--that, to
her, was as though it had never been--not a blurred, tear-stained love
letter, not a bunch of faded violets, but a little, fat, bright blue
pitcher, with great, flaming vermilion roses on either side, the most
grotesquely and uncompromisingly ugly bit of crockery that one would
find from Dan to Beersheba.

Have you never noticed that it is often the most whimsically
inconsequent, the most utterly ordinary, the most intrinsically
prosaic of inanimate things that, with a sudden and overwhelming rush,
will call into being memories the tenderest, the deepest, the saddest?
It may be a worthless little book, a withered flower ghastly in its
brown grave clothes, a cheap, tawdry trinket; it may be something as
intangible as a few bars of a hackneyed song ground out on a wheezy,
asthmatic hand organ. But just so surely as one has lived--and