The young man with his eyes upon the floor began, "Well--they're just letters, Aunt Molly--just letters--such as I used to write before--don't you know." His voice was dull and passionless, and he went on: "I can't tell you more about them. They're just letters." He drew in a quick long breath and exclaimed: "Oh, you know what they are--I want to talk to some one and I'm going to. Oh, Aunt Molly," he cried, "I'm not heart-broken, and all that--I'm infinitely happy. Because I still hold it--it doesn't die. Don't you see? And I know that always it will be with me--whatever may come to her. I don't want to forget--and it is my only joy in the matter, that I never will forget. I can be happy this way; I don't want to give any other woman a warmed-over heart, for this would always be there--I know it--and so I am just going to keep it." He dropped his voice again after a sigh, and went on: "There, that's all there is to it. Do you think I'm a fool?" he asked, as the colour came into his face. "No, Neal, I don't," said Molly Brownwell, as she stood beside him. "You are a brave, manly fellow, Neal, and I wish I could help you. I don't see how now--but the way will come--sometime. Now," she added, "tell me about the paper." And then they went into business matters which do not concern us; for in this story business conjures up the face of John Barclay--the tanned, hard face of John Barclay, crackled with a hundred wrinkles about the eyes, and scarred with hard lines about the furtive crafty mouth; and we do not wish to see that face now; it should be hidden while the new soul that is rising in his body struggles with that tough, bronzed rind, gets a focus from the heart into those glaring brass eyes, and teaches the lying lips to speak the truth, and having spoken it to look it. And so while John Barclay in the City is daily slipping millions of his railroad bonds into the market,--slipping them in quietly yet steadily withal, mixing them into the daily commerce of the country, so gently that they are absorbed before any one knows they have left his long grasping fingers,--while he is trading to his heart's content, let us forget him, and look at this young man, that September night, after he left Molly Brownwell, sitting at his desk in the office with the telephone at his elbow, with the smell of the ink from the presses in his nostrils, with the silence of the deserted office becalming his soul, and with his heart--a clean, strong, manly heart--full of the picture of a woman's face, and the vision without a hope. In his brain are recorded a thousand pictures, and millions of little fibres run all over this brain, conjuring up those pictures, and if there are blue eyes in the pictures, and lips in the pictures, and the pressure of hands, and the touch of souls in the pictures,--they are Neal Ward's pictures, --they are Mr. Higgin's pictures, and Mrs. Wiggin's pictures, and Mr. Stiggin's pictures, my dears, and alack and alas, they are the