“If she knew who I was, she would hate me,” he mused, “but, not knowing, I have the deepest, truest and warmest friendship that young, girlish heart is capable of giving.” He thought of the words he had somewhere read, “that the love which is tenderest and sweetest in a woman’s breast has its birth in friendship, gradually growing into a deeper passion.” Then again his eyes took on the look of cynical coldness so habitual to them. “Bah!” he cried; “what man is mad enough to trust the happiness of his future in the hands of a girl of sixteen, when he has passed the boundary line of thirty? She might like me in her childish way now, but at five-and-twenty she would have her eyes opened to her folly, and hate me most cordially.” Then he turned his eyes to his paper most moodily, and was soon fathoms deep in its pages, as it were, all forgetful of Jess, and the incident which had stirred his heart like wine--the clasp of those soft arms around his neck. He had turned the second page of the _Herald_, and was running his eye leisurely down one of the columns, when an article met his eye that drove every vestige of color from his face. Like one stunned he read the caption: “A Brilliant Marriage in High Life. Miss Queenie, the Only Daughter of Lawyer Trevalyn, of No. -- Fifth Avenue, New York, Married at Noon To-day to----” He could see no more, for a blood-red mist floated before his eyes; his hands trembled so that the sheet before him was rent in twain at the very column he had been reading, so tense was the strain of his clutch; then, like a dead one, he fell face downward under the trees, suffering from the keenest pain a human heart can know. He was so far from the house, so far from all human sound, that the bitter cries that welled up from the depths of his anguished soul could not be heard. And, lying there, he wept as few men weep in a lifetime. He had known that it must come; he had been watching for it; he had not missed one of the New York papers since he had been ill. He had sent for the back numbers from the day he had been stricken, and had scanned their columns with an intensity which nearly brought on a relapse when he was enabled to sit up to read them. But the article for which he searched, and dreaded so to behold, did not appear. “Had anything occurred to break off the match between Ray Challoner and his lost Queenie?” he would ask himself over and over again. And with that thought came the glimmering hope, if that were the case, he might even yet win her, for the fortune which she craved was now his through the sale of his books. Then he would thrust the thought from him with loathing. No! a thousand times no! He would never buy a wife. He would go unwedded to the grave first, and he hated his own weakness for still craving her love and her presence.