I went in. We sat in the sitting-room and talked of our school-days and our fortunes. I told her how I had gone down to the city, how I had prospered, of my adventures in the world, of my marriage--dealing very gently with my relations with the late Mrs. Stanhope--of my bereavement and present idyllic existence. And she told me of herself, how she had lived on and on in the little cottage, caring only for the support and education of her niece, Phyllis Kinglake, an orphan for nearly twenty years. "You remember Sylvia?" she said, with the first touch of emotion. Did I remember Sylvia? My little fair-haired playmate with the large eyes and the blue veins showing through the delicate beauty of her face? Little Sylvia, who first won my boyish affection, and with whom I made a solemn contract of marriage when we were only seven years old? Did I not remember how I would pass her house on my way to school, and stand at the gate and whistle until she came shyly out, with her face as red as her little hood and tippet, and give me her books to carry, and protest with the ever present coquetry of girlhood that she thought I had gone long ago? Could I ever forget how I saved my coppers, one by one, until I had accumulated a sum large enough to buy a whole cocoanut, which I presented to her in the proudest moment of my life, and how the other girls tossed their heads with the affectation of a sneer, and with pretended indifference to this astonishing stroke of fortune? And that fatal evening when I provoked my little beauty's wrath, and in all the receding opportunities of "Post-Office" and "Copenhagen" she had turned her face and rosy lips away from me, until the world was black with a hopeless despair? And the singing-school where she was our shining ornament, and that blissful night when I stood up with her in the village church, while we sang our duet descriptive of the special virtues of some particular flower nominated in the cantata? And how, growing older and shyer, we still preserved our youthful fancy even to the day I struck out into the world, both believing in the endurance of the tie that would draw me back? What caprice of fate is it that dispels the illusions of youth and restores them tenfold in the reflection of after years and over the gulf of the grave? Did I remember Sylvia?