The next moment he stood before me, Dr. Clayton! his face perfectly unruffled and wearing an expression of content, at least, if not perfect happiness. I was conscious of a faintness stealing over me, but by a strong effort I shook it off, and rising to my feet, I offered him my hand, which he pressed, saying, “This is indeed a surprise, Rose—I beg your pardon, Mrs. Delafield, I suppose?” I nodded in the affirmative, and was about to say something more, when another footstep approached, and my husband’s tall figure darkened the doorway. For an instant they both turned pale, and Dr. Clayton grasped the piano nervously; but the shock soon passed away, and then as friend meets friend after a brief separation, so met these two men, who but the year before had watched together over my pillow, praying, the one that I might live, and the other that I might die. Wonderingly the little girl looked up into her father’s face, and pulling the skirt of my dress, said, “Who is the lady, pa? with the pretty curls so much like mine?” Never before, I believe, did I like Dr. Clayton as I did at that moment when I saw the deep tenderness which broke over his features as he took his daughter in his arms, and pressing his lips to her forehead, answered, “It is _Rosa Lee_, my child, the lady for whom you were named.” “Don’t you love her, pa? _I_ do,” she asked, stretching her little fat arms towards me. I glanced at my husband—his brow was dark as midnight. I looked at Dr. Clayton, there was a slight quivering of his lips, while his wife was pale as a water lily, and then I burst into a merry laugh, in which the gentlemen soon joined, though it would have puzzled us all to have told at what we were laughing. After a few words of explanation as to why we were there, Dr. Clayton suddenly remembered himself, and leading me towards the lady, introduced her as “My wife, Mrs. Clayton.” She had been living in Florida with a cousin, at whose house they were married, about two weeks before, and they were now on their way to Boston, stopping for a few days in Charleston to see the city. I found her a very quiet, sensible woman, but as different from Dell Thompson, or Rosa Lee, as a person well could be, and I was wondering to myself how it was possible for a man to love so many people of opposite temperaments, when she said something about New England, and I asked if she were ever there. “Oh, yes,” she answered, “I was born there, in Wilbraham, Mass. I was living with the grandmother of the first Mrs. Clayton at the time of her death.”