"I cannot tell," I answered. "I only know that he died here, if there be such a thing as death—that no one has ever lived here since. I doubt if the door has ever been opened till we came."
"They have always been with me," he continued, "these dreams. But I have always dismissed them. They seemed so ludicrous. Always there came to me wealth, power, victory. Life was so easy."
He laid his thin hand on mine. A strange new look came into his eyes—a look of hope, almost of joy.
"Do you know what it seems to me?" he said. "You will laugh perhaps, but the thought has come to me up here that God has some fine use for me. Success was making me feeble. He has given me weakness and failure that I may learn strength. The great thing is to be strong."
SYLVIA OF THE LETTERS.
Old Ab Herrick, so most people called him. Not that he was actually old; the term was an expression of liking rather than any reflection on his years. He lived in an old-fashioned house—old-fashioned, that is, for New York—on the south side of West Twentieth Street: once upon a time, but that was long ago, quite a fashionable quarter. The house, together with Mrs. Travers, had been left him by a maiden aunt. An "apartment" would, of course, have been more suitable to a bachelor of simple habits, but the situation was convenient from a journalistic point of view, and for fifteen years Abner Herrick had lived and worked there.
Then one evening, after a three days' absence, Abner Herrick returned to West Twentieth Street, bringing with him a little girl wrapped up in a shawl, and a wooden box tied with a piece of cord. He put the box on the table; and the young lady, loosening her shawl, walked to the window and sat down facing the room.
Mrs. Travers took the box off the table and put it on the floor—it was quite a little box—and waited.
"This young lady," explained Abner Herrick, "is Miss Ann Kavanagh, daughter of—of an old friend of mine."