That wilderness of single instances;”

when he, too, dwelt in that other-world of the young, forgotten by everyone but himself, but, although hardly ever remembered, never forgotten by him—not one grain of its golden sand, not one drop of its honey-dew, not one tremor of its slightest thrill—then even he had had his romance. The freshness of the early spring morning, the airy brightness of his young visitor, himself no bad exponent of the day, the awe-footed shadow which, with almost unrecognized obtrusion, skirts the border where the ripened grain fills the field of life and nods to the ready sickle—was it something of such kind, or was it the simple story of which he had had such telling intimation, that brought it all up in memory’s half-tender glow? He, too, had once been in love. He, too, had written verses to his inamorata. He remembered it all now, with a smile of mingled pity and contempt. It needed no ransacking of the brain now to quicken into full view his own “It might have been”—to people once more the mystic world whose first paradise is rich in the slight garniture of glances and sighs and smiles and tears. Lost in himself, the old man forgot his visitor.

“You are very young,” he said at last, absently.

“Twenty-three,” was the answer.

“And she?”

“Eighteen.”

It was strange, but he, too, had been twenty-three and she eighteen when the end came in that glimmering, gleaming past. He remembered, and how strange the recollection seemed, taking her some flowers and some slight silver gift—a poor, inexpensive thing; she would let him give no more because he, too, was in debt—on her birthday. And now, with strange revulsion, he hardened almost into his habitual self, and grimly thought that it all was youthful nonsense, and that all such follies were very much alike. Had he spoken, he would have been guilty of one of those faults often packed with error, an apothegm—he would have said that we only become original, even in our folly, as age gives us character.

“We could be so happy with so little,” said the youthful lover.

The old man started. These were his own words many, many years ago; his very words to his guardian when the final appeal was made by old Bevington to what he called his better judgment so very, very long ago, in the dark, stately house upon Second Avenue.

“So very little,” repeated the young man. “I have always said,” he continued, as pleased with the conceit as if it had never before glittered in the song of finches of his feather, “that we should have gold enough in her hair.”