The man looked about thirty years of age, was tall, slender, and was neither strong nor handsome, but had an amiable face. He was doubtless a clerk fit to be something better. The woman was perhaps twenty-four. She was not quite beautiful, yet she was more than pretty. She was of good size and figure, and the short plush coat that she wore, and the manner in which she kept her hands thrust in the pockets thereof, gave to her a dauntless air which the quiet and affectionate expression of her face softened. She was a brunette, her eyes being large and distinctly dark brown, her face having a peculiar complexion which is most quickly affected by any change in health. The colour of her cheek, the dark rim under her eyes, and the other indefinable signs, indicated some radical ailment. In the quick glance that I had of that pair, while the woman was smiling, a feeling of pity came over me. I have never detected the exact cause of that emotion. Perhaps in the woman's face I read the trace of past bodily and mental suffering; perhaps a subtle mark that death had already set there. Neither the woman nor her husband noticed me as they passed. The dog regarded me cautiously with the corner of his eye. I probably would never have thought of the three again had I not seen them upon the bridge, under exactly the same circumstances, on the next Sunday. So these young and then happy people walked here every Sunday, I thought. This, perhaps, was an event looked forward to throughout the week. The husband, doubtless, was kept a prisoner and slave at his desk from Monday morning until Saturday night, with respite only for eating and sleeping. Such cases are common, even with people who can think and have some taste for luxury, and who are not devoid of love for the beautiful. The sight of happiness which exists despite the cruelty of fate and man, and which is temporarily unconscious of its own liabilities to interruption and extinction, invariably fills me with sadness, and the sadness which arose at the contemplation of these two beings begat in me a strange sympathy for an interest in them. On Sundays thereafter I would go early to the bridge and wait until they passed, for it proved that this was their habitual Sunday walk. Sometimes they would pause and join those who gazed down at the black river. I would, now and again, resume my journey toward the hospital while they thus stood, and I would look back from a distance. The bridge would then appear to me an abrupt ascent, rising to the dense city, and their figures would stand out clearly against the background.