aid, "I shall skip some Shakspeare
if I meet a congenial intellectual soul to gossip with."

He had scarce been gone two minutes when there came a gentle tapping at
the door and, the visitor being invited to come in, the girls were
astonished to behold the young gentleman with the dyed carnation and the
crimson silk handkerchief. He looked at Esther with an affable smile.

"Don't you remember me?" he said. The ring of his voice woke some
far-off echo in her brain. But no recollection came to her.

"I remembered you almost at once," he went on, in a half-reproachful
tone, "though I didn't care about coming up while you had another fellow
in the box. Look at me carefully, Esther."

The sound of her name on the stranger's lips set all the chords of
memory vibrating--she looked again at the dark oval face with the
aquiline nose, the glittering eyes, the neat black moustache, the
close-shaved cheeks and chin, and in a flash the past resurged and she
murmured almost incredulously, "Levi!"

The young man got rather red. "Ye-e-s!" he stammered. "Allow me to
present you my card." He took it out of a little ivory case and handed
it to her. It read, "Mr. Leonard James."

An amused smile flitted over Esther's face, passing into one of welcome.
She was not at all displeased to see him.

"Addie," she said. "This is Mr. Leonard James, a friend I used to know
in my girlhood."

"Yes, we were boys together, as the song says," said Leonard James,
smiling facetiously.

Addie inclined her head in the stately fashion which accorded so well
with her beauty and resumed her investigation of the stalls. Presently
she became absorbed in a tender reverie induced by the passionate waltz
music and she forgot all about Esther's strange visitor, whose words
fell as insensibly on her ears as the ticking of a familiar clock. But
to Esther, Leonard James's conversation was full of interest. The two
ugly ducklings of the back-pond had become to all appearance swans of
the ornamental water, and it was natural that they should gabble of auld
lang syne and the devious routes by which they had come together again.

"You see, I'm like you, Esther," explained the young man. "I'm not
fitted for the narrow life that suits my father and mother and my
sister. They've got no ideas beyond the house, and religion, and all
that sort of thing. What do you think my father wanted me to be? A
minister! Think of it! Ha! ha! ha! Me a minister! I actually did go fo