e.

"In less than a week she was dead. The others mourned her, but I
didn't, master. She had sounded the deeps of living and there was
nothing else to linger through the years for. _My_ grief had spent
itself earlier, when I walked this garden in agony because I could
not help her. But often, on these long warm summer afternoons, I seem
to hear Alice's laughter all over this garden; though she's been dead
so long."

He lapsed into a reverie which I did not disturb, and it was not until
another day that I learned of the other memory that he cherished. He
reverted to it suddenly as we sat again in the hop-vine arbour,
looking at the glimmering radiance of the September sea.

"Master, how many of us are sitting here?"

"Two in the flesh. How many in the spirit I know not," I answered,
humouring his mood.

"There is one--the other of the two I spoke of the day I told you
about Alice. It's harder for me to speak of this one."

"Don't speak of it if it hurts you," I said.

"But I want to. It's a whim of mine. Do you know why I told you of
Alice and why I'm going to tell you of Mercedes? It's because I want
someone to remember them and think of them sometimes after I'm gone. I
can't bear that their names should be utterly forgotten by all living
souls.

"My older brother, Alec, was a sailor, and on his last voyage to the
West Indies he married and brought home a Spanish girl. My father and
mother didn't like the match. Mercedes was a foreigner and a Catholic,
and differed from us in every way. But I never blamed Alec after I saw
her. It wasn't that she was so very pretty. She was slight and dark
and ivory-coloured. But she was very graceful, and there was a charm
about her, master--a mighty and potent charm. The women couldn't
understand it. They wondered at Alec's infatuation for her. I never
did. I--I loved her, too, master, before I had known her a day. Nobody
ever knew it. Mercedes never dreamed of it. But it's lasted me all my
life. I never wanted to think of any other woman. She spoiled a man
for any other kind of woman--that little pale, dark-eyed Spanish girl.
To love her was like drinking some rare sparkling wine. You'd never
again have any taste for a commoner draught.

"I think she was very happy the year she spent here. Our thrifty
women-folk in Stillwater jeered at her because she wasn't what they
called capable. They said she couldn't do anything. But she could do
one thing well--she could love. She w