derful
look of hers, which made her face for the moment verily beautiful, and
unclasping her hands, she threw them about the other's neck, whispering
in awed tones:

"Yet you loved him! loved him too!"

Then after a moment of silence dear to both their hearts, she drew back
to give her friend one other look, and quietly said:

"His heart is mine now, Ermentrude, wholly and truly mine. And so you
would have it be, I am sure. Life looks fair to me and very sweet; but
however fair, however sweet, that life is yours if ever you want it and
when you want it. The time may come--one never knows--when I can pay you
back this debt. Till then, let there be perfect trust and perfect love
between us. Give me your hand upon it--not just your lips--for I speak as
men speak when they mean to keep their word."

Their eyes met, their hands clasped; then the bridegroom drew away his
bride, and Ermentrude turned with bowed head and glistening eyes, to
enter upon the new life awaiting her in ways she had yet to tread.

* * * * *

The second series of episodes opens with the meeting of a man and woman
on a rustic bridge spanning a Swiss chasm. They are strangers to each
other, yet both instinctively pause and a flush of intuitive feeling dyes
the cheek of each.

The eternal, ever-recurring miracle has happened. He sees Woman for the
first time, though he had thought himself in love before and had wandered
thus far in an effort to forget. So, likewise, with her. She had had her
fancies, or rather her one fancy; but when in strolling along this road
ahead of her party she saw rising between her and the glorious landscape
which had hitherto filled her eye the fine masculine head and perfect
figure of Carleton Roberts, this fancy floated from her mind like the
veriest thistledown, leaving it free to expand in fuller hopes and deeper
joys than visit many women even when they think they love.

Alas! why in that instant of mutual revelation had not the further grace
been given them of quick catastrophe shutting the door upon a future of
which neither could then dream or sense the coming doom.

It was not to be.

He passed, she passed, and for the time the look they gave each other was
all; but the world had been glorified for them both--and Destiny waited.

* * * * *

"Good looks? Yes; but nothing else; very ordinary connections, very. A
little money, true. Her uncle, whom