g so
heavy that it sometimes quite over-balances me. My thoughts have been
busy to-night with the days of my youth, and the spell of memory has
been so strong that I have not been quite myself. As you came in view I
actually entertained the incredible idea for a moment that somehow I saw
in you the materialized memories of myself and another as we once walked
this same path."

The young man bowed as Mr. Morgan ended in a manner indicating his
acceptance of the apology, although he looked both amazed and amused.
But the explanation had a very different effect upon the girl at his
side. As she listened her eyes had filled with tears and her face had
taken on a wonderfully tender, pitiful smile. When he ended speaking,
she impulsively said, "I'm so sorry we were not what you thought us! Why
not pretend we are, to-night at least? We can pretend it, you know. The
moonlight makes anything possible;" and then glancing at Miss Rood, she
added, as if almost frightened, "Why, how much we look alike! I'm not
sure it isn't true, anyway."

This was, in fact, an unusually marked example of those casual
resemblances between strangers which are sometimes seen. The hair of the
one was indeed gray and that of the other dark, but the eyes were of the
same color by night, and the features, except for the greater fulness of
the younger face, were cast in the same mould, while figure and bearing
were strikingly similar, although daylight would doubtless have revealed
diversities enough that moonlight refused to disclose.

The two women looked at each other with an expression almost of
suspicion and fear, while the young man observed, "Your mistake was
certainly excusable, sir."

"It will be the easier to pretend," said the girl as with a
half-serious, half-sportive imperiousness she laid her hand on Mr.
Morgan's arm. "And now it is thirty years ago, and we are walking
together." He involuntarily obeyed the slight pressure, and they walked
slowly away, leaving the other two after an embarrassed pause to follow
them.

For some time they walked in silence. He was deliberately abandoning
himself to the illusion, supported as it was by the evidence of his
senses, that he was wandering in some of the mysterious between-worlds
which he had so often dreamed of, with the love of his youth in her
youth-time charm. Did he really believe it to be so? Belief is a term
quite irrelevant to such a frame as his, in which the reflective and
analytical