What was it that gave such interest to the little familiar pool to him, who had smoked his cigar by the lotos-pools of Yeddo’s moats, or dreamed these same summer hours away by the fountain of the Court of Lions in far Granada? Well enough knew Mr. Austin May what memory it was that hung about the place; and he smiled his mature and mocking smile as he remembered his boyish love. Many times had they two wandered there, May Austin and himself, wandering together through crusty Uncle Austin’s strange demesne; his uncle Austin, her aunt’s husband. Old John Austin had married for love a poor and beautiful cousin whose mother had engineered the marriage against the girl’s will; and they had hated one another very cordially. Too proud to be divorced, John Austin had built himself this strange pavilion where his wife had promised she would never go. She kept her word faithfully; and he never went into the house without first sending in his card. They met in company, and with the greatest courtesy, and gave their grand due dinners of sixteen, each at one end of the long table, with a splendid high épergne between. Mrs. Austin had taken May Austin into her lonely bosom, and Uncle John had had Austin May home from college, where his bounty kept him, and had given him his taste for claret, and tried to give his knowledge of the world. And they used to sit there, he and his uncle, in this same pavilion, smoking, close hedged in from womankind. And when the old man had fallen asleep, Austin would creep out into the park, and walk there with his lovely cousin May. And on one summer day, for all the world like this, he won her heart, this gay young Harvard senior, all among the rushes by the lily-pool. And Austin had gone back into the pavilion, quaking, to tell his uncle, and found the latter very dignified and dead, a bottle of the famous Eclipse Lafite close by his elbow. As with the old French poet “Hear ye, who are soon to die, What Villon did before he started-- He drank one glass of Burgundy; This he did; and then, departed.” the claret had not been wasted; its very last glass had been savored by its master before his spirit took flight. Austin May was overcome with horror. He ran and gave the alarm at the house, and then sought his cousin May, whom he found, standing lovely, in the twilight by the lilies. He kissed her, preliminarily, and put his strong arm about her slender waist; then he broke the news to her, and then he kissed her again, by way of peroration.