Addressing to her some indifferent remark, she gradually led the conversation backward to the subject of her early home, asking again what she could remember, but Adah was scarcely more satisfactory than on the previous night. Memories she had of a gentle lady, who must have been her mother, of a lad who called her sister, and kissed her sometimes, of a cottage with grass and flowers, and bees buzzing beneath the trees. "Are you faint?" Hugh asked, quickly, as his mother turned white as ashes, and leaned against the mantel. She did not seem to hear him, but continued questioning Adah. "Did you say bees? Were there many?" "Oh, yes, so many, I remember, because they stung me once," and Adah gazed dreamily into the fire, as if listening again to the musical hum heard in that New England home, wherever it might have been. "Go on, what more can you recall?" Mrs. Worthington said, and Adah replied: "Nothing but the waterfall in the river. I remember that near our door." During this conversation, Hugh had been standing by the table, where lay a few articles which he supposed belonged to Adah. One of these was a small double locket, attached to a slender chain. "The rascal's, I presume," he said to himself, and taking it in his hand, he touched the spring, starting quickly as the features of a young-girl met his view. How radiantly beautiful the original of that picture must have been, and Hugh gazed long and earnestly upon the sweet young face, and its soft, silken curls, some shading the open brow, and others falling low upon the uncovered neck. Adah, lifting up her head, saw what he was doing, and said: "Don't you think her beautiful?" "Who is she?" Hugh asked, coming to her side, and passing her the locket. "I don't know," Adah replied. "She came to me one day when Willie was only two weeks old and my heart was so heavy with pain. She had heard I did plain sewing and wanted some for herself. She seemed to me like an angel, and I've sometimes thought she was, for she never came again. In stooping over me the chain must have been unclasped. I tried to find her when I got well, but my efforts were all in vain, and so I've kept it ever since. It was not stealing, was it?" "Of course not," Hugh said, while Adah, opening the other side, showed him a lock of dark brown hair, tied with a tiny ribbon, in which was written, "_In memoriam_, Aug. 18." As Hugh read the date his heart gave one great throb, for that was the summer, that the month when he lost the Golden Haired. Something, too, reminded him of the warm moonlight night, when the little snowy fingers, over which the fierce waters were soon to beat, had strayed through his heavy locks, which the girl had said were too long to be becoming, playfully severing them at random, and saying "she means to keep the fleece to fill a cushion with." "I wonder whose it is?" Adah said; "I've thought it might have been her mother's."