"Miss Margaret Melville," she repeated, looking at her son, who stood, leaning with an air of stately indifference against a pillar of the piazza. I had withdrawn my hand from his arm, and felt as if the breadth of the frozen ocean was between us. "Does Mr. Ernest Linwood forget his old friend so easily?" she asked, in a clear, ringing voice, extending a fair ungloved hand. "Do you not remember Madge Wildfire, or Meg the Dauntless, as the students used to call me? Or have I become so civilized and polished that you do not recognize me?" "I did not indeed," said he, receiving the offered hand with more grace than eagerness, "but it is not so much the fault of _my_ memory, as the marvellous change in yourself. I must not say improvement, as that would imply that there was a time when you were susceptible of it." "You may say just what you please, for I like frankness and straightforwardness as well as I ever did; better,--a great deal better, for I know its value more. And you, Ernest, I cannot call you any thing else, you are another and yet the same. The same stately, statue-like being I used to try in vain to teaze and torment. It seems so long since we have met, I expected to have seen you quite bent and hoary with age. Do tell me something of your transatlantic experience." While she was speaking in that peculiar tone of voice which reminded one of a distant clarion, Richard Clyde came to me on the other side, and seeing that she wished to engage the conversation of Ernest, which she probably thought I had engrossed too long, I took the offered arm of Richard and returned to the drawing-room. Seeing a table covered with engravings, I directed our steps there, that subjects of conversation might be suggested independent of ourselves. "How exquisite these are!" I exclaimed, taking up the first within my reach and expatiating on its beauties, without really comprehending one with my preoccupied and distant thoughts. "These Italian landscapes are always charming." "I believe that is a picture of the Boston Common," said he, smiling at my mistake; "but surely no Italian landscape can boast of such magnificent trees and such breadth of verdure. It is a whole casket of emeralds set in the granite heart of a great city. And see in the centre that pure, sparkling diamond, sending out such rays of coolness and delight,--I wonder you did not recognize it." "I have seen it only in winter, when the trees exhibited their wintry dreariness, and little boys were skating on the diamond surface of that frozen water. It looked very different then." "Mr. Linwood could explain these engravings," said he, drawing forward some which indeed represented Italian ruins, grand and ivy mantled, where the owl might well assert her solitary domain. "He has two great advantages, an eye enlightened by travel, and a taste fastidious by nature."