"Harry English—he must have been a dear." She turned her head to look for the inevitable portrait. There was scarce a room in Saltwoods that did not hold two or three presentments of him; sketches, most of them, by the faithful, forcible hand of the artist mother; photographs, too, in well-nigh every stage of the boy’s development. Even Aspasia, positive, practical, unimaginative, could not but have fallen under the influence of the haunting presence. And in her actual mood of disillusion with Raymond Bethune, the ante-room of her girl’s heart, that airy space open to all the winds, where so many come, pause, and go, was now, half in idleness, half in contradiction, consecrate to the image of gallant Harry English. "How Aunt Rosamond could!" she thought, as she dreamily fixed her eyes upon that charcoal sketch which held one panel of the drawing-room, and which had been Mrs. English’s last work. It was a much enlarged copy of the photograph on the shrine, and, whether by some unconscious transcription of her own sorrow, or whether her mother eyes had discovered in the little picture some stern premonition of his own approaching fate, the artist had given the strong bold face an expression that was almost bitter in its melancholy. "How Aunt Rosamond could——" thought the girl, "when she had been loved by such a man, ever, ever have looked at any one else? Fancy—the Runkle!" Ah, if Aspasia had been loved by English, how nobly she would have borne her widowhood! Her heart, of course, would have been absolutely, completely broken; she would have gone about in deep, deep widow’s weeds. And strangers, looking after her, noticing the sweet pale face amid the crape, would ask who she was and would be told in whispers: the widow of the hero of the Baroghil expedition. "Ah, it would have been sweet to have been loved by you, Harry English!" Her hands fell from the piano; her soul was away upon a dream as vague and innocent as it was absorbing. Too often did the Leschetizky method end in this manner. The while Rosamond, high in her attic, dreamed that she was a girl once more, and that she had just been told that Harry English loved her. *CHAPTER IV* There was sunshine enough without to have tempted the most obstinate recluse into the fields. But as little as she had heeded November rain did Rosamond now heed the brightness of this opening December. While the old attic room held her bodily presence, her soul was once again back in the past. The past ... where, after all, she had not lived, and which (strange poignant lesson of fate!) was now to become to her more living than the present. Those letters, those early memorials, the very thought of which had once inspired dread, now drew her like a magnet. Scarcely could she give herself to the necessary facts of life, so impatiently did she long for those solitary hours in his room, with him!