Their conjunction disturbed and vaguely troubled her. She tried over and over again to reassure herself by saying that it was a mere accident; of course they had been acquainted with each other for years, and they had happened to meet, and what more natural than that they should walk on side by side? And yet it somehow seemed wrong. Reuben Tracy was the best man she had ever known. Poor girl--so grievous had been her share of life’s lessons that she really thought of him as the only good man she had ever known. In all the years of her girlhood--unhappy, wearied, and mutinous, with squalid misery at home, and no respite from it possible outside which, looked back upon at this distance, did not seem equally coarse and repellent--there had been but this solitary gleam of light, the friendship of Reuben Tracy. Striving now to recall the forms in which this friendship had been manifested, she was conscious that there was not much to remember. He had simply impressed her as a wise and unselfish friend--that was all. The example of kindness, gentleness, of patient industry which he had set before her in the rude, bare-walled little school-room, and which she felt now had made a deep and lasting impression on her, had been set for all the rest as well. If sometimes he had seemed to like her better than the other girls, his preference was of a silent, delicate, unexpressed sort--as if prompted solely by acquaintance with her greater need for sympathy. Without proffers of aid, almost without words, he had made her comprehend that, if evil fell upon her, the truest and most loyal help and counsel in all the world could be had from him for the asking. The evil had fallen, in one massed, cruel, stunning stroke, and she had staggered blindly away--away anywhere, anyhow, to any fate. Almost her instincts had persuaded her to go to him; but he was a young man, only a few years her senior--and she had gone away without seeing him. But she had carried into the melancholy, bitter exile a strange sense of gratitude, if so it may be called, to Reuben Tracy for the compassionate aid he would have extended, had he known; and she said to herself now, in her heart of hearts, that it was this good feeling which had remained like a leaven of hope in her nature, and had made it possible for her at last, by its mysterious and beneficent workings, to come out into the open air again and turn her face toward the sunlight. And he had taken off his hat to her! The very thought newly nerved her for the ordeal which she had proposed to herself--the task of bearing, here in the daily presence of those among whom she had been reared, the burden of a hopelessly discredited life. CHAPTER III.--YOUNG MR. BOYCE’S MEDITATIONS.