stay at Farview, and the sudden recollection of an important paper that he had locked up in his desk, instead of committing it to the safer guardianship of the fire-proof safe, suggested itself as an excellent excuse for a speedy departure. He decided that he would take his leave early in the morning, and see Coralie no more until he had determined that the past had become so far a dream as to admit of a new dream of the future. This honorable decision being reached, his mind was sufficiently at ease to allow him to notice that his pace had gradually become a very slow one, in half unconscious conformity to the lagging footsteps behind him,--footsteps which spoke so unmistakably of a troubled mind or an exhausted frame. It even appeared that Miss Thane stopped altogether, now and then, by reason of absorbing thought, or from the necessity of taking breath. Bergan hesitated for a moment, divided between the fear of being intrusive, and the kindly impulse to afford timely help; but the latter prevailed, and, the path having widened somewhat, he turned and offered her his arm. She shook her head absently, at first; then seemed to become suddenly aware that support was needful, and accepted it. "We are privileged to be silent, I believe," said Bergan, as they moved on together, "only in the presence of strangers or friends. Count me in either category, as you please, and do not trouble yourself to talk. I see you are tired." "Thank you," returned Miss Thane, in a cool tone of acquiescence. Across the next two fields, their own linked shadows, sliding slowly over the ground in advance of them, were not more silent than they. The voices of their companions, who had far outstripped them, reached their ears only in subdued and harmonious murmurs. The moonlight lay over the earth like a visible blessing of peace; and even threw a kind of reflected brightness into Miss Thane's heart, by the aid of which she was better able to try to find some pathway out of its shadows. In that one terrible moment, when she had seemed to see Coralie wrapped in flames, a swift vision of herself, left standing alone in the world--without relative, without friend, without human affection, hope, or solace--a lonely, empty, unsatisfied heart--had risen before her, and left her appalled, even in the midst of her thankfulness that it was only a vision as yet, and not a reality. For, how easily, through the agency of a boat or an engine, a fever or a chill, a thousand every-day accidents, it might still become a reality! With what was she then to supply Coralie's place in her heart and life?