But never from the first to last had she received a letter from him that was transparent; the mystery stayed unlifted; she had to accept the constancy of his friendship without its confidence. Question or chiding of course there never was from her; inborn refinement alone would have kept her from curiosity or prying; but she could not put away the conviction that the concealment which he steadily adhered to was either delicately connected with his marriage or registered but too plainly some downward change in himself. Which was it, or was it both? Had he too missed happiness? Missed it as she had--by a union with a perfectly commonplace, plodding, unimaginative, unsympathetic, unrefined nature? And was it a mercy to be able to remember him, not to know him? These thoughts filled her so often, so often! For into the busiest life--the life that toils to shut out thought--the inevitable leisure will come; and with the leisure will return the dreaded emptiness, the loneliness, the never stifled need of sympathy, affection, companionship--for that world of two outside of which every other human being is a stranger. And it was he who entered into all these hours of hers as by a right that she had neither the heart nor the strength to question. For behind everything else there was one thing more--deeper than anything else, dearer, more sacred; the feeling she would never surrender that for a while at least he had cared more for her than he had ever realized. One mild afternoon of autumn she was walking with quiet dignity around her garden. She had just come from town where she had given to Jouett the last sitting of her portrait, and she was richly dressed in the satin gown and cap of lace which those who see the picture nowadays will remember. The finishing of it had saddened her a little; she meant to leave it to him; and she wondered whether, when he looked into the eyes of this portrait, he would at last understand": she had tried to tell him the truth; it was the truth that Jouett painted. Thus she was thinking of the past as usual; and once she paused in the very spot where one sweet afternoon of May long ago he had leaned over the fence, holding in his hand his big black had decorated with a Jacobin cockade, and had asked her consent to marry Amy. Was not yonder the very maple, in the shade of which he and she sat some weeks later while she had talked with him about the ideals of life? She laughed, but she touched her handkerchief to her eyes as she turned to pass on. Then she stopped abruptly. Coming down the garden walk toward her with a light rapid step, his head in the air, a smile on his fresh noble face, an earnest look in his gray eyes, was a tall young fellow of some eighteen years. A few feet off he lifted his hat with a free, gallant air, uncovering a head of dark-red hair, closely curling. "I beg your pardon, madam," he said, in a voice that fell on her ears like music long remembered. "Is this Mrs. Falconer?"