"Ah, yes! God alone knows how I have suffered all these years," I said, half-choked. "You were her friend, Miss Miller, therefore you will forgive me if even to-day I wear my heart upon my sleeve. You will say, perhaps, that I am foolish, yet when a man loves a woman honestly, as I did, and he craves for affection and happiness, the catastrophe of parting is a very severe one--often more so to the man than to the woman. But," I added quickly, "pardon me, I am talking to you as though you were as old as myself. You, at your age, have never experienced the bitterness of a blighted love." "Unfortunately I have," she answered, in a low, trembling voice. "I, too, loved once--and only once. But, alas! after a few short weeks of affection, of a bliss that I thought would last always, the man I loved was cruelly snatched from me for ever." And she sighed and tears welled in her fine eyes, as she looked aimlessly straight before her--her mind filled with painful recollections. She told me no more, and left me wondering at the secret love romance that, to my great surprise, seemed to have already hardened her young heart. Every girl, even in her school years, has her own little affair of the heart, generally becoming hopelessly infatuated with some man much her senior, who is in ignorance of the burning he is awakening within the girlish breast. But hers was, I distinguished, a real serious affection, one which, like my own, had ended in black grief and tragedy. But she had told me one truth--a ghastly truth. I had misjudged my dear dead love! She had still loved me--she had still been mine--in heart my own! CHAPTER TWELVE. IN WHICH A STRANGE THING HAPPENS. "If your love has ended in tragedy, as mine has done, then we can surely sympathise with each other, Miss Miller," I said, looking into her tearful eyes. "You know well how I have suffered. I believed that Ella really preferred that man to myself, and what you have now told me amazes me. I believed that she was false to me--and yet you tell me that she was true. Ah! how dearly I loved her! I do not believe that any man ever loved a woman so fondly, and with such fierce passion as I did. I was hers--body and soul. My love for her was that deep, all-consuming affection which sometimes makes a man as wax in a woman's hands--to be moulded for good or for evil as she wills it. I lost all count of time, of friends, of everything, for I lived only for her. The hours when we were parted were to me like years, her words were music, her smiles the sunlight of my life, her sighs the shadows, her kisses the ecstatic bliss of terrestrial paradise in which I lived. Ah! yes, you who have loved and lost can well understand all that her love meant to me--you can understand why one dark foggy night I stood upon Charing Cross platform and swore an oath that never again would I put foot in the country which, though my native land, held for me only a poignant memory."