Sometimes a poignant pang smote the heart of the lonely man as some absorbed and eager acquaintance greeted him, from force of habit, with the old look of inquiry as to his identity, one of those who used formerly to ask inadvertently, “Is this you, or your brother?” eliciting in those happy days the delighted response “Of course, it is my brother.” Alas, how Randal wished now that it was his brother,--to be himself lying in that quiet grave to which he was sure their ill-fated resemblance had consigned Adrian in the flower of his youth, and that it was he who was here among these streets of busy men with many a long year of life before him. “But you should thank God that you are privileged to suffer in his stead,” Hildegarde would argue with him. “He would have had all this torture to endure if you had been the one called away.” Shortly after his arrival in Memphis he had gravitated to her father’s house, where he often sat for hours in the library in the quiet atmosphere of the books, her face pensive, illumined by the flash and sparkle of the fire as she worked with dainty, deft fingers on a bit of embroidery. Informal visits these, and often other members of the family gathered around the hearth,--her father, talking levee-board, and the stage of the river, the price of cotton and the dangers of overproduction; her college-boy brother, a football expert, a famous halfback with the latest sensations of the gridiron on Thanksgiving-day; her mother, soft and sweet, with that frank look of Hildegarde in her duller eyes, for which Randal loved her. He found the only comfort he knew in this group. Once, however, the young girl’s unthinking candor almost stunned him. “Such an odd thing,” she said one day when all were present; she was evidently coming from far reaches of her reverie; she had been carefully matching the skeins for the embroidered gentian blooming under the benison of her touch, and he had a fleeting thought that she might have rivaled nature had she compared them to the tint of her eyes. “I met Mrs. Floyd-Rosney yesterday at the Jennison reception, and she asked me such a strange question.” She paused, but he would not inquire, and the others, realizing the malapropos subject, could not sufficiently command their embarrassment. But the transparent Hildegarde needed no urgency. “Mrs. Floyd-Rosney asked me,” she said, laying all the skeins together in her right hand while she looked up with bright interest, “if you had ever told me of the contents of the letter she wrote to you some months ago.” “And what did you answer?” asked Randal, breaking the awkward silence. “Why, of course I told her that you had never mentioned the letter,” replied Hildegarde, with a flash of surprise. “I told her the truth.” “You did! Why, you amaze me!” exclaimed Randal, with a touch of his old gayety, and with the laugh that rippled around the circle the incident passed.