She sank again into his chair, and gave herself over to the thoughts crowding in her heart. How the threads of his life ran next to hers, and crossed and recrossed them. The slave auction, her dance with him, the Fair, the meeting at Mr. Brinsmade's gate,--she knew them all. Her love and admiration for his mother. Her dreams of him--for she did dream of him. And now he had saved Clarence's life that she might marry her cousin. Was it true that she would marry Clarence? That seemed to her only a dream. It had never seemed real. Again she glanced at the signature in the book, as if fascinated by the very strength of it. She turned over a few pages of the book, "Supposing the defendant's counsel essays to prove by means of--" that was his writing again, a marginal, note. There were marginal notes on every page--even the last was covered with them, And then at the end, "First reading, February, 1858. Second reading, July, 1858. Bought with some of money obtained by first article for M. D." That capacity for work, incomparable gift, was what she had always coveted the most. Again she rested her elbows on the desk and her chin on her hands, and sighed unconsciously. She had not heard the step on the stair. She had not seen the door open. She did not know that any one wage in the room until she heard his voice, and then she thought that she was dreaming. "Miss Carvel!" "Yes?" Her head did not move. He took a step toward her. "Miss Carvel!" Slowly she raised her face to his, unbelief and wonder in her eyes, --unbelief and wonder and fright. No; it could not be he. But when she met the quality of his look, the grave tenderness of it, she trembled, and our rendered her own to the page where his handwriting quivered and became a blur. He never knew the effort it cost her to rise and confront him. She herself had not measured or fathomed the power which his very person exhaled. It seemed to have come upon him suddenly. He needed not to have spoken for her to have felt that. What it was she could not tell. She knew alone that it was nigh irresistible, and she grasped the back of the chair as though material support might sustain her. "Is he--dead?" She was breathing hard. "No," she said. "Not--not yet, They are waiting for the end." "And you?" he asked in grave surprise, glancing at the door of the Judge's room. Then she remembered Clarence. "I am waiting for my cousin," she said. Even as she spoke she was with this man again at the Brinsmade gate. Those had been her very words! Intuition told her that he, too, was thinking of that time. Now he had found her at his desk, and, as if that were not humiliation enough, with one of his books taken down and laid open at his signature. Suffused, she groped for words to carry her on. "I am waiting for Clarence, Mr. Brice. He was here, and is gone somewhere."