He had joined Mrs. Etheridge on the street, and he walked home with her. When they reached her handsome residence, and the doors were thrown open, she did not ask him to come in, but said good-bye rather abruptly. She crossed the magnificent hall and walked with a firm step up the grand staircase. Then, entering her own splendid apartment, she locked herself in and stood silent a few moments. Then she spoke aloud, safe from being heard in that lofty vastness. “That was the man I could have loved,” she said, “the man I do love! And I might have married him!” In a second, she added, in a tone grown thick and indistinct with tears: “And he loves me, too! I know he does--or did, until he knew!” She stretched out her arms, with her hands clenched hard, and saw herself reflected from every side in splendidly-framed mirrors, which gave back her image, from head to feet, in her elegant French costume. They showed her, too, the innumerable beauties of her luxurious rooms, hung with satin and carpeted with velvet. She gave a cry of horror, and shut out the vision with her hands. Her birthright was gone, and this was her mess of pottage! His Heart’s Desire His Heart’s Desire It was a beautiful country through which the Aroona River ran; so beautiful that at last, after ages of unmolested repose, a railroad had been built along the top of the mountain ridge, and tourists had begun to talk of its attractions. As yet, however, they knew the fertile little valley only from a distance. The point most admired by the passengers on those flying trains, was that where the Aroona lay beneath them, like a great tin funnel on its side. They could see it, in one place, broad and placid, and could follow distinctly its sharp and sudden compression into a passage forced between two great walls of rock, where it seethed and rushed through the contracted space representing the stem of the funnel. This was called The Narrows, and below it was The Falls--a foaming cataract that dashed relentlessly over great, dangerous-looking rocks. Perhaps the passing tourists sometimes wondered what sort of men and women they were, who lived in the odd, misshapen little houses, bunched together to form the tiny village, which was not much more than a dot on the landscape. It soon passed out of sight, and they thought of it no more, and yet it is likely that they were more concerned about these obscure country people, whose very isolation made them interesting to speculative minds, than the latter allowed themselves to be concerned about the occupants of the trains, which, twice a day, darted along the high horizon line, almost as swift and mysterious as meteors crossing the heavens. They were tranquil-minded, unimaginative people, and lived their lives and died their deaths in this distant valley of the earth, without much interest in what lay beyond.