stood there awaiting her with the roll in her hand, she
might have been some young girl on her way to her music lesson.

"If my brother returns before I do, tell him to wait."

"Madame is going"--

"Out," said Mrs. Ashwood blithely, and tripped downstairs.

She made her way directly to the shore where she remembered there was
a group of rocks affording a shelter from the northwest trade winds.
It was reached at low water by a narrow ridge of sand, and here she had
often basked in the sun with her book. It was here that she now unrolled
John Milton's manuscript and read.

It was the story she had told him, but interpreted by his poetry and
adorned by his fancy until the facts as she remembered them seemed to
be no longer hers, or indeed truths at all. She had always believed
her cousin's unhappy temperament to have been the result of a moral and
physical idiosyncrasy,--she found it here to be the effect of a lifelong
and hopeless passion for herself! The ingenious John Milton had given a
poet's precocity to the youth whom she had only known as a suspicious,
moody boy, had idealized him as a sensitive but songless Byron, had
given him the added infirmity of pulmonary weakness, and a handkerchief
that in moments of great excitement, after having been hurriedly pressed
to his pale lips, was withdrawn "with a crimson stain." Opposed to this
interesting figure--the more striking to her as she had been hitherto
haunted by the impression that her cousin during his boyhood had been
subject to facial eruption and boils--was her own equally idealized
self. Cruelly kind to her cousin and gentle with his weaknesses while
calmly ignoring their cause, leading him unconsciously step by step in
his fatal passion, he only became aware by accident that she nourished
an ideal hero in the person of a hard, proud, middle-aged practical
man of the world,--her future husband! At this picture of the late Mr.
Ashwood, who had really been an indistinctive social bon vivant, his
amiable relict grew somewhat hysterical. The discovery of her real
feelings drove the consumptive cousin into a secret, self-imposed exile
on the shores of the Pacific, where he hoped to find a grave. But the
complete and sudden change of life and scene, the balm of the wild woods
and the wholesome barbarism of nature, wrought a magical change in his
physical health and a philosophical rest in his mind. He married the
daughter of an Indian chief. Years passed, the her