lly overgrown with the
dulness of familiarity and had lapsed into an indolent affectionate
habit. The warm voluptuous pulse of this new feeling--new, and yet
instantly recognized as old--brought with it a flood of youthful
associations, and commingled the far past with the present in a
confusion more complete and more intoxicating than ever. He saw double
again. "Married!" he murmured dreamily. "Yes, surely, we will be
married."

And as he spoke he looked at her with such a peculiar expression that
she was a little frightened. It looked like a more serious business than
she had counted on, and for a moment if she could have cut and run,
perhaps she would have done so. But she had a strain of the true
histrionic artist about her, and with a little effort rose to the
difficulty of the role. "Of course we will be married," she replied with
an air of innocent surprise. "You speak as if you had just thought of
it."

He turned toward her as if he would sober his senses by staring at her,
his pupils dilating and contracting in the instinctive effort to clear
the mind by clearing the eyes.

But with a steady pressure on his arm she compelled him to walk on by
her side. Then she said, in a soft low voice, as if a little awed by
what she were telling, while at the same time she nestled nearer his
side, "I had such a sad dream last night, and your strange talk reminds
me of it. It seemed as if we were old and white-haired and stooping, and
went wandering about, still together, but not married, lonely and
broken. And I woke up feeling you can't think how dreary and sad--as if
a bell had tolled in my ears as I slept; and the feeling was so strong
that I put my fingers to my face to find if it was withered; and when I
could not tell certainly, I got up and lit my lamp and looked in the
glass; and my face, thank God! was fresh and young; but I sat on my bed
and cried to think of the poor old people I had left behind in my
dream."

Mabel had so fallen into the spirit of her part that she was really
crying as she ended. Her tears completed Mr. Morgan's mental confusion,
and he absolutely did not know whom he was addressing or where he was
himself, as he cried, "No, no, Mary! Don't cry! It shall not be: it
shall never be."

Lightly withdrawing her hand from his arm, she glided like a sprite from
his side, and was lost in the shadows, while her whispered words still
sounded in his ear, "Good-bye for thirty years!"

A moment after