Presently Florence said slowly: "All ancestors were not thieves. Some were simply fickle, and light, and faithless."
Nellie raised a face full of passionate suffering: "Florence! Florence! how can you excuse either of us? How can—"
Suddenly, with a great sob, Florence Campbell threw herself into the girl's outstretched arms, and with a wail of utter desolation cried: "Hush, Nellie, hush! Never speak of it again, never! Only love me, love me—love me! I need it so! And no one—no one in all the world has ever loved me truly!" It was the only time Nellie ever saw Florence Campbell lose her self-control.
FLORENCE CAMPBELL'S FATE.
"'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear...."
"Every man has a history worth knowing, if he could tell it, or if we could draw it from him."—Ralph Waldo Emerson.
I was sitting in my office, with my head in my hands, and with both elbows resting on my desk. I was tired in every nerve of my body; more than that, I was greatly puzzled over the strange conduct of my predecessor in the college, whose assistant I had been, and whose place I was appointed to fill during the unexpired term for which he had been elected lecturer on anatomy.
That morning he was to introduce me to the class formally as his successor, deliver his last lecture, and then retire from active connection with anatomical instruction.
Everything appeared to be perfectly arranged, and, indeed, some of the younger men—under my direction—had taken special pains to provide our outgoing and much admired professor with rather unusual facilities for a brilliant close to his career as our instructor.