they once more recalled to my
memory--very strangely, as I then thought--the predictions of Dame
Dermody in the days of my boyhood. Here were the foretold sympathies
which were spiritually to unite me to Mary, realized by a stranger whom
I had met by chance in the later years of my life!

Thinking in this direction, did I advance no further? Not a step
further! Not a suspicion of the truth presented itself to my mind even
yet.

Was my own dullness of apprehension to blame for this? Would another man
in my position have discovered what I had failed to see?

I look back along the chain of events which runs through my narrative,
and I ask myself, Where are the possibilities to be found (in my case,
or in the case of any other man) of identifying the child who was Mary
Dermody with the woman who was Mrs. Van Brandt? Was there anything left
in our faces, when we met again by the Scotch river, to remind us of our
younger selves? We had developed, in the interval, from boy and girl to
man and woman: no outward traces were discernible in us of the George
and Mary of other days. Disguised from each other by our faces, we were
also disguised by our names. Her mock-marriage had changed her surname.
My step-father's will had changed mine. Her Christian name was the
commonest of all names of women; and mine was almost as far from being
remarkable among the names of men. Turning next to the various occasions
on which we had met, had we seen enough of each other to drift into
recognition on either side, in the ordinary course of talk? We had met
but four times in all; once on the bridge, once again in Edinburgh,
twice more in London. On each of these occasions, the absorbing
anxieties and interests of the passing moment had filled her mind and
mine, had inspired her words and mine. When had the events which had
brought us together left us with leisure enough and tranquillity
enough to look back idly through our lives, and calmly to compare the
recollections of our youth? Never! From first to last, the course of
events had borne us further and further away from any results that could
have led even to a suspicion of the truth. She could only believe when
she wrote to me on leaving England--and I could only believe when I read
her letter--that we had first met at the river, and that our divergent
destinies had ended in parting us forever.

Reading her farewell letter in later days by the light of my matured
experience, I note how re