“I shall never wear them again without feeling that they are tenfold more precious than ever before,” the young girl said, with starting tears.
She little knew that even then one of them was lost. She had removed her linen ulster upon returning home, and left her cuffs hanging in it.
Miss Mehetabel now lifted the velvet bed, and laid it with all its glittering wealth upon the table near which she sat. Beneath it lay a locket of blue enamel and gold, studded with diamonds; a little bunch of dried flowers, a crumpled card, and a pair of soiled white kid gloves.
“These,” Miss Mehetabel said, touching the flowers, “I wore in my hair that night, fastened with the butterfly; and these are the gloves—they bear the last touch of his hand. This is the card on which the Count de Lussan wrote his name.”
She took up the locket with a tender touch.
“This contains the face of the one man on earth to me. Open it, dear—I cannot.”
Brownie took it, the great tears rolling over her flushed cheeks. It seemed so inexpressibly sad, and as if she, too, were about to look upon the face of the dead.
She pressed the spring and it flew open. From one side of it there gazed up at her the dark, noble face of a man about twenty-five years of age.
The fair girl gazed upon it for several moments in silence, then heaving a deep sigh, she said, softly:
“He was grand, auntie!”