en flag about me! I felt a
little confused as I answered her.

"I am sorry to disappoint you. The green flag is somewhere in my house
in Perthshire."

"You have not got it with you?" she exclaimed. "You leave her keepsake
lying about anywhere? Oh, Mr. Germaine, you have indeed forgotten Mary!
A woman, in your place, would have parted with her life rather than part
with the one memorial left of the time when she first loved!"

She spoke with such extraordinary earnestness--with such agitation, I
might almost say--that she quite startled me.

"Dear Miss Dunross," I remonstrated, "the flag is not lost."

"I should hope not!" she interposed, quickly. "If you lose the green
flag, you lose the last relic of Mary--and more than that, if _my_
belief is right."

"What do you believe?"

"You will laugh at me if I tell you. I am afraid my first reading of
your face was wrong--I am afraid you are a hard man."

"Indeed you do me an injustice. I entreat you to answer me as frankly as
usual. What do I lose in losing the last relic of Mary?"

"You lose the one hope I have for you," she answered, gravely--"the hope
of your meeting and your marriage with Mary in the time to come. I was
sleepless last night, and I was thinking of your pretty love story by
the banks of the bright English lake. The longer I thought, the more
firmly I felt the conviction that the poor child's green flag is
destined to have its innocent influence in forming your future life.
Your happiness is waiting for you in that artless little keepsake!
I can't explain or justify this belief of mine. It is one of my
eccentricities, I suppose--like training my cats to perform to the music
of my harp. But, if I were your old friend, instead of being only
your friend of a few days, I would leave you no peace--I would beg and
entreat and persist, as only a woman _can_ persist--until I had made
Mary's gift as close a companion of yours, as your mother's portrait in
the locket there at your watch-chain. While the flag is with you, Mary's
influence is with you; Mary's love is still binding you by the dear old
tie; and Mary and you, after years of separation, will meet again!"

The fancy was in itself pretty and poetical; the earnestness which had
given expression to it would have had its influence over a man of a far
harder nature than mine. I confess she had made me ashamed, if she had
done nothing more, of my neglect of the green flag.

"I will look for it the mom