"You will come again," she said. "As you have no daughter, and there must be many things needed to make you comfortable during your convalescence, you will let me see to all that. And you will let me replace the many things you must have lost or worn out during these hard three months?"
She spoke beseechingly, looking up into his face like a child pleading for a toy.
"You shall just wind me round your finger like he did," said Abel. "I allus thought I'd got grit in me till I seen him, and then it seemed as though I hadn't no will but his'n."
Sybil was alone with the little packet. With trembling fingers she untied the string and removed the wrappings of paper. There lay the medallion with its twisted chain. She passionately kissed the battered enamel that had stood between him and death. Then she opened the locket. With the silky, yellow curl lay a little lock of dark-brown hair. She was touching it tenderly, wondering when he had placed it there for her consolation—whether just before the skirmish or soon after he left her—when a turn of the locket in the level rays of the sun showed two words scratched on the inner side with some rude instrument. She looked closer, and read: "Noblesse Oblige."
When Miss Mildred came to lead her into the house, there was a change in her face that filled the gentle lady's heart with gratitude. It was the look of courage that comes to those who recognize the claim of their high birth as the children of God.
THE SPIRIT OF CATHOLIC ASSOCIATIONS.
TRANSLATED FROM THE CIVILTA CATTOLICA.