At dinner Miss Ramsey noticed her flushed face, and, when they went into the drawing-room, took her hands. "You are feverish," she said, "and you ate nothing." Mariana laughed excitedly. "No," she answered, "I am well--very well." They sat down together, and she looked at Miss Ramsey with quick tenderness. "Am I good to you?" she asked. "Am I good to the servants?--to everybody?" "What is it, dear?" "Oh, I want to begin over again--all over again! It is but fair that one should have a second chance, is it not?" Miss Ramsey smiled. "Some of us never have a first," she said; and Mariana took her in her arms and kissed her. "You shall have yours," she declared. "I will give it to you." When she went up-stairs a little later she took down an old square desk from a shelf in the dressing-room and brought it to the rug before the fire. Kneeling beside it, she turned the key and raised the narrow lid of ink-stained mahogany. It was like unlocking the past years to sit surrounded by these memories in tangible forms, to smell the close, musty odor which clings about the relics of a life or a love that is dead. She drew them out one by one and laid them on the hearth-rug--these faded things that seemed in some way to waft with the scent of decay unseizable associations of long-gone joy or sorrow. The dust lay thickly over them, as the dust of forgetfulness lay over the memories they invoked. There was a letter from her mother written to her in her babyhood, and the fine, faded handwriting recalled to her the drooping figure--a slight and passionate woman, broken by poverty and disappointments, with vivacious lips and eyes of honest Irish blue. There was a handful of mouldered acorns, gathered by childish fingers on the old plantation; there was the scarlet handkerchief her mammy had worn, and the dance-card of her first ball, with a colorless silk tassel hanging from one end. Then she pushed these things hastily aside and looked for others, as one looks beneath the sentiments for the passions of one's life. She found a photograph of Anthony, pasted on cheap card-board--a face young and intolerant, with the fires of ambition in the eyes and the lines of self-absorption about the mouth. Still looking at the boyish face, she remembered the man that she had seen that morning--the fires of ambition burned to ashes, the self-absorption melted into pain.