The Well-Beloved

now. Neither did he know, though he felt drowsy, whether inexpectant sadness-that gentle soporific-lulled him into a short sleep, so that he lost count of time and cons

ed from her twenty years earlier, in the lane hard by. A renascent reasoning on the impossibility of

e been asle

should be false-a thing incredible-that sweet friend of his youth, despite the transfiguring effects of moonlight, would not now look the sa

rned his feet in the direction of East Quarriers, the village of his birth and of hers. Passing the market-square he pursued the arm of road to 'Sylvania Castle,' a private mansion of comparatively modern date, in whose grounds stood

d the cottage which with its quaint and massive stone features of two or three centuries' antiquity, was capable even now of longer resistance to the rasp of Time tha

chyard and had fancied to be the illusion of a dream. And though there was this time no doubt about her reality, the isolation of her position in the silent house lent her a curiously s

t be lonely for her there to-night, poor maid! Yes, good-now;

she come to

to sea and was drowned,

uarryowners

rich, sold out, and disappeared altogether from the island which had been their making. The Pierstons kept a dogged middle course, throve without show or noise, and also retired in their turn. The Caros were pulled completely down in the competition with the other two, and when Widow Caro's daughter married her cousin Jim Caro, he tried to regain for the family its

eeply remorseful, knocked at the door of the minute

nable to get over the strange feeling that he was t

ir,' sa

s not the same a

d my surname. Poor mot

Ann or otherwise, you are Avice

ave,

listened to a score of years before, and bent eye

ing of her death and burial I took the liberty of cal

funeral, but I have just been to put some flowers on her grave, and I took it off afore going that the damp mid not spoil the crape. You see, she was bad a long ti

hurt yourself do

anything for me if they happen to come along. But I can hardly trust 'em. Sam Scribben t'other day twisted a linen tabl

been. This Avice would never recite poetry from any platform, local or other, with enthusiastic appreciation of its fire. There was a d

in ni

ent. But he was now forty, if a day. She before him was an uneducated laundress, and he was a sculptor and a Royal Academicia

as a lodging-house for visitors, it now stood empty and silent, the evening wind swaying the euonymus and tamarisk boughs in the front-the only evergreen shrubs that could weather the whipping salt gales which sped past the walls. Opposite the house, far out at sea, the f