The young man bowed, as Mr. Morgan ended, in a manner indicating his acceptance of the apology, although he looked both amazed and amused. But the explanation had a very different effect upon the girl at his side. As she listened, her eyes had filled with tears, and her face had taken on a wonderfully tender, pitiful smile. When he ended speaking, she impulsively said, "I 'm so sorry we were not what you thought us! Why not pretend we are, to-night at least? We can pretend it, you know. The moonlight makes anything possible;" and then glancing at Miss Rood, she added, as if almost frightened, "Why, how much we look alike! I 'm not sure it isn't true, anyway." This was, in fact, an unusually marked example of those casual resemblances between strangers which are sometimes seen. The hair of the one was indeed gray and that of the other dark, but the eyes were of the same color by night, and the features, except for the greater fullness of the younger face, were cast in the same mould, while figure and bearing were strikingly similar, although daylight would doubtless have revealed diversities, enough that moonlight refused to disclose. The two women looked at each other with an expression almost of suspicion and fear, while the young man observed, "Your mistake was certainly excusable, sir." "It will be the easier to pretend," said the girl, as with a half-serious, half-sportive imperiousness she laid her hand on Mr. Morgan's arm. "And now it is thirty years ago, and we are walking together." He involuntarily obeyed the slight pressure, and they walked slowly away, leaving the other two, after an embarrassed pause, to follow them. For some time they walked in silence. He was deliberately abandoning himself to the illusion, supported as it was by the evidence of his senses, that he was wandering in some of the mysterious be-tween-worlds which he had so often dreamed of, with the love of his youth in her youth-time charm. Did he really believe it to be so? Belief is a term quite irrelevant to such a frame as his, in which the reflective and analytical powers are for a time purposely held in abeyance. The circumstances of her introduction to him had dropped from his mind as irrelevant accidents, like the absurdities which occur in our sweetest and most solemn dreams without marring their general impression in our memories. Every glance he threw upon his companion, while on the one hand it shocked his illusion in that she seemed not likely to vanish away, on the other strengthened it with an indescribable thrill by the revelation of some fresh trait of face or figure, some new expression, that reproduced the Miss Rood of his youth. Not, indeed, that it is likely his companion was thus perfectly the double of that lady, although so much resembling her, but the common graces of maidenhood were in Mr. Morgan's mind the peculiar personal qualities of the only woman he had ever much known.