The thought struck him as ungrateful, and, as if to make amends for it, he took up the other little volume. It was a thin book bound in white vellum, with Millicent’s name in illuminated text upon its cover. The covers of this small tome were closed with a gold clasp, which he finally succeeded in opening. It proved to be a diary in manuscript; he recognized the clear, delicate handwriting of the girl he loved. Yes, he loved her tenderly; why else should he press the senseless pages close to his lips, kissing the fair paper over which her fairer hand had passed? He drew his lamp nearer to him and prepared to read the record. It was written in Italian, and the first page bore a date five years back. He was somewhat puzzled, but supposed he had misunderstood what she had told him of the book. She could have been but a child then; she was now only just past her majority. How pretty she must have been at sixteen, before she had grown to the perfect womanhood which now became her so well! He fancied her in all the shyness and awkwardness of young maidenhood, with childhood reluctantly slipping from her, and girlhood anxiously leading her forward. Again he kissed the book, but reverently this time, and with a deep sigh as if it had been a holy one. If he could have known her then, before he had grown to feel so old, before she had learned that she was fair and young, how much easier it would have been for both of them. As he sat with unseeing eyes fixed on the faintly traced characters, beholding in fancy the little Millicent of half-grown figure and cool, loveless eyes stooping over the book, putting her white, childish thoughts into these words, it seemed to him that he heard a faint sound,--a sound that was deeper than the wind stirring the tops of the redwoods; a sound that made him shiver and turn the bright flame of the lamp a little higher. It was like a noise heard dimly in a dream, an echo of a woman’s sob ringing faint and muffled through a space of years, was it, or of distance? It had grown quite cold; and he heaped an armful of brushwood on the dying fire, which soon shot up the little chimney with a cheery roar, and threw its bright light to the farthest corner of the room, touching the picture on the easel, bringing out the ugly little _netshukés_ from their shadowy corner, and shining on the polished steel of the gun standing near the maulstick and fishing-rod.