is, and we cannot warm it if we
try, the chimney smokes so badly. You will be so uncomfortable there.
You might let the fire go down in m--, in the other room, if the heat
affects you. Dorothy says you suffer greatly with asthma."

"Yes--no," Grey replied, confusedly, scarcely willing to commit himself
again to the asthma. "I shall not mind the cold at all. I am accustomed
to it. You must remember I come from the land of ice and snow. You have
no idea what blizzards America is capable of getting up, and ought to
hear how the wind can howl and the snow drift about an old farm-house in
a rocky pasture land, which I would give much to see to-night."

There was a tone of regret in his rich, musical voice, and forgetting
that Neil had said he was from Boston. Bessie said to him:

"Is that farm-house your home?"

"Oh, no; my home proper is in Boston," he answered her, "but I have
spent some of my happiest days in that house, and the memory of it and
the dear woman who lives there is the sweetest of my life, and the
saddest, too," he added, slowly; for, right in Bessie's blue eyes,
looking at him so steadily, he seemed to see the hidden grave, and for a
moment all the old bitter shame and humiliation which had once weighed
him down so heavily, and which, naturally, the lapse of years had tended
to lighten, came back to him in the presence of this young girl who
seemed so inextricably mixed up with everything pertaining to his past.

It was like some new place which we sometimes come suddenly upon, with a
strange feeling that we have seen it before, though when we cannot tell;
so Bessie impressed Grey as a part of the tragedy enacted in the old New
England house many, many years ago, and covered up so long. He almost
felt that she had been there with him and that now she was standing by
the hidden grave and stretching her hand to him across it with an offer
of help and sympathy. And so strong was this impression that he actually
lifted his right hand an instant to take in it the slender one resting
on the mantel, as Bessie talked to him.

"What would she say if she knew?" he thought, feeling that it would be
easy to tell her about it,--feeling that she was one to trust even unto
death.

Bessie was interested in Grey, and already felt the wonderful mesmeric
influence he exercised over all who came in contact with him. In the
_salons_ of fashion, in the halls of Eaton and Oxford, in the railway
car, or in the privacy of do