I remember I was young once, Ah! how long ago it seems Since the happy days and months Passed away like pleasant dreams! For I loved then. I can smile now At myself. ’Twas long ago, Ere time’s hand had sprinkled snow To cool love’s fever on my brow. --ROSALIE OSBORNE. Everard Dawn’s words fell on his sister’s ears with a great shock, so deep was the anguish of his tone and the emotion of his face, his lips trembling under the rich brown beard, and his eyes gleaming under their heavy brows like shadowed surfaces of deep blue pools, while the pallor of his face was ghastly to behold. She studied the agitated man in wonder and terror, for he was almost like a stranger to his sister, having never met her since he was a youth of sixteen, just entering college. Since she had married in Virginia while on a visit from her home in the far South, her communications with her relatives had been almost broken off; the death of her father soon followed her marriage, and her only visit home had been to the death-bed of her step-mother when Everard was just entering college. She was his only near relative, and she had urged the lonely boy to visit her often, but he had never accepted the invitation but once, having to work too hard at his chosen profession--the law--to find time, he said. Their correspondence had been infrequent, and she knew little of him, save that he had been married twice, and that on the death of his second wife he had brought her his child to raise, and gone away abruptly, a broken-hearted, lonely man. Yet, as she looked at him sitting there, so handsome still in his young, splendid prime, with threads of premature silver creeping into the thick locks on his temples, and remembered how heavily the shadows of grief had stretched across his life, the woman’s heart was moved to pity and tenderness, such as she had felt in his babyhood days, when he was the pet and darling of all. Her cold gray eyes softened with sympathy, as she cried: “Surely, Everard, you have had more than your share of sorrow in life! What new trouble is this? For, of course, you would not oppose such a splendid match for your daughter without grave reasons.” He lifted his heavy eyes to her troubled face, and answered, bitterly: “Yes, I have reasons, grave and bitter reasons, for forbidding this marriage, and I thank Heaven I came in time to prevent it. But ask me nothing, Rebecca, for I shall never willingly divulge my reasons, not even to the man whom I must send away sorrowing to-morrow over a broken love-dream.” His voice fell to exquisite pathos, as if he almost pitied the man he intended to wound so cruelly. Mrs. Flint was disappointed, crest-fallen, she had been so elated over her niece’s prospects. She rejoined, uneasily: