Some girl that his uncle had loved, perhaps. The young man's face, dark-eyed, romantic, familiar to him through the old picture in uniform always on his mother's dressing-table, rose before his mind's eye. Perhaps Uncle William had taken the little picture away with him to the war. The date must have been just about the time that he had enlisted and marched away. He had gone without telling her perhaps; she could have been little more than a child. Perhaps he had never told. Or they might have had their brief tragic happiness upon the edge of death, they two "embracing under death's spread hand." He stared at the picture. It would have been easy to love a girl with those eyes, that mouth. A fancy came upon him to put Uncle William's picture beside the girl's, and impulsively he went back to the darkened drawing-room, groped for the framed picture that stood upon the mantel, found it, and carried it up to his room. Then side by side he studied the two faces. His imagination began to reconstruct their story. He wished that he might learn more. He went back to the old desk. It might have been his uncle's. He opened a drawer; it was empty. A second and a third; the last contained some valueless miscellany, an old glass knob a faded bit of worsted fringe, some papers. Poking under them, he actually found a package of letters. He picked it up, and with a little thrill of realization recognized his uncle's writing. The paper was old and yellowed with time. It had no address, but was sealed with red wax. Scarcely expecting fulfillment of his romantic hope, he broke the seal and opened the package. There was no address on the first envelope. Some business memorandum, no doubt; yet nothing surely that at this late day he might not in honor examine. He drew out the closely written sheet and turned it over. After all the years his eyes were surely the first to read it. There was no name in the inscription. Uncle William's fine writing was very legible. II July 15, 1863.