Suddenly he started with an exclamation that was almost a cry. What was it? He remembered that, more than two years ago, on the last day he had been with her, he had begged the copy of a duet which they sometimes sang. It was in manuscript, and he desired to have it written out by her own hand. He had before petitioned, and she promised it; and when he thus again spoke of it, she laughed, and said, "What a memory it is, to be sure! I shall have to tie a bit of string on my finger to refresh it."
"Is that efficacious?" he had asked.
"Doubtless," she had replied, searching in her pocket for a scrap of anything that would serve.
"Will this do?" he then queried, bringing forth a coil of gold wire which he had been commissioned to buy for some fanciful work of his mother.
"Finely," she declared; "it is durable, it will give me a wide margin, it will be long in wearing out."
"Nay, then, you must have something more fragile," he had objected.
At that they both laughed, as he twisted a fragment of it on the little finger of her right hand. "There it is to stay," he asserted, "till your promise is redeemed." That was the last time he had seen her till to-day.
Now, sitting, thinking of the interview just passed, suddenly he remembered, as one often recalls the vision of something seemingly unnoticed at the time, that, upon her right hand, the little finger of the right hand, there was a delicate ring,—a mere thread,—in fact, a wire of gold; the very one himself had tied there two years ago.
In an instant, by one of those inexplicable connections of the brain or soul, he found himself living over an experience of his college youth.
He had been spending the day in Boston with a dear friend, some score of years his senior; a man of the rarest culture, and of a most sweet and gentle nature withal; and when evening came they had drifted naturally to the theatre,—the fool's paradise it may be sometimes, but to them on that occasion a real paradise.