“Spring came and I gathered wild flowers to wreathe the brows of both. One day, while absent from home, a message came for me that my wife was ill and desired me to come. I grew palsied with fear. I hastened home to find her just able to speak to me. She had had a violent hæmorrhage of the lungs. I was wild. I knelt before her, and clasping her in my arms begged her not to die, but live for my sake and her boy’s. She put her white arm about my neck, drawing me to his little face and hers, as she said faintly, ‘Burton, keep the darling child, who is ours,—but I—I am Alfred’s!’—and was gone. “For months I did not know what happened. All was a blank. My boy died before I came to myself, and I was alone again in the world. I travelled till my health permitted work, and then I labored incessantly. “I love Mary now as I loved her so long ago. No other can ever fill her place. She is as much mine to love as ever. All this has whitened my hair, you see. I must lock up my heart again, lest the world look in upon my idols. Do you see that I have reason for not loving again?” Marsh’s head was bowed. He loved Cone as a brother, and he had suffered all this and loved on, and was brave and strong. “Let us take my little girl and go back to yours and Mary’s home,” said Marsh. “Yes, and Mary has an only sister strangely like your wife. You need another heart to lean upon. Your nature is different from mine.” Not many years after Marsh had taken the sister to be a mother to his pretty daughter, and Burton Cone, leaving his property to this little one, had been laid to rest by the side of Mary. UNSUITABLE. “IT NEVER will happen,” said Jane Holcomb to her sister Nancy, as they sat together before an open fire. “Justus is too bright a young man to fall in love with a woman nearly twice his own age. Think of our educating our only nephew at a most expensive college, having all our hopes centred in his future prominence, and then have him make an unsuitable marriage!” “But we have never seen this woman he seems to love,” said Nancy quietly. “Perhaps we should like her. I think she must have some admirable qualities, or Justus would never be fond of her. Besides, he is a favorite with ladies, and could marry surely a pretty girl of his own age.” Jane and Nancy Holcomb were sisters, well-to-do in the world, very necessary to each other, but not especially necessary to the rest of the community. Nancy was half an invalid, who repaid the care of her sister with a nearly perfect affection. She would have made a lovely wife had she been married some years before.