“Truly things do seem to go wrong sometimes in this world,” madam said, sadly, and thinking of the poor sweet child who had passed through such deep water. Then, suddenly looking up at her companion with a keen glance, she continued: “You have suffered, my friend, deeply—you suffer now, even though you strive so nobly to overcome it; but—would you deem me very unsympathetic if I should tell you that I believe it will be better for you, after all, not to have married Editha Dalton, even though she could have given her wounded heart into your keeping?” Paul Tressalia regarded her with astonishment. “Why should you say that?” he asked. “She is not exactly fitted for you—you might have passed a quiet, peaceful life together, but you could not have met all the wants of her nature, nor she of yours. You are maturer for your years than she is for hers, and beautiful, talented, lovable though she may be, there would have come a time in your lives when you both would have discovered there was something wanting to fill out the measure of your happiness.” “You speak like a prophetess,” Paul Tressalia said, with a sad, skeptical smile. “I have not lived my lonely life for naught,” she answered, with a sigh. “I have studied human nature in all its phases, and, from what I know of you, I feel that the woman whom you should marry should be quiet and self-contained like yourself, with a little touch of sorrow in her life to mate your own, and nearer your age.” “I shall never marry,” he said, with a pale and suffering face, and yet wondering at his companion’s strange words, while somehow his thoughts involuntarily took a swift flight, and he saw in the quiet parlor of a vine-clad gothic villa a gentle woman, with a sweet though sad face, which, next to Editha Dalton’s, he had once told himself was the most beautiful his eyes had ever rested upon, while her voice, with its plaintive music, had vibrated upon his heart as the gentle summer breeze vibrates upon the strings of an æolian harp. He had called it sympathy then. Would the mystic future, as it drew on apace, gradually efface this bitter pain from his heart, and he find beneath it a new name written there? “You may think so now, but believe me, Paul, my friend, you will find her yet—this gentle, beautiful woman whom you should marry,” madam said, in reply to his remark about not marrying. “My dear madam,” he returned, with a smile and a shake of his head, “you are but building castles in the air, which the lightest breath will dissipate. A man can never love but once as I have loved Editha Dalton.” “That may be true,” madam smilingly assented; “but the first fierce, wild passion may not always be the wisest love. Wait a little, _mon ami_, and we shall see. You know— ‘No one is so accursed by fate, No one so utterly desolate, But some heart, though unknown, Responds unto his own.’