ith
twenty years added on him, with the light of hope and ambition dimmed
by contact with the world, and his youthful alertness and dash
succeeded by the resigned vacuity of one who has seen none of his
early dreams realized. Again did Miss Clarissa ask if he would have
his purchases sent to his address, but this time it was not entirely
curiosity and the perfunctory performance of a duty, for she would
gladly have been of service to one of such a pleasing presence.
Communing with himself for a moment, the young man said:

"On the whole, you may. But they must be delivered to me in person,
into my own hands. I would take them, but I have a number of other
things to take. Remember, they are to be delivered to me in person,"
and he handed her a card which announced that his name was Asbury
Fuller and on which was written in lead pencil the address of a house
in a quarter of the city which, once the most fashionable of all, had
suffered from the encroachments of trade and where a few mansions yet
occupied by the aristocracy were surrounded by the deserted homes of
families which had fled to the newer haunts of fashion, leaving their
former abodes to be occupied by boarding mistresses, dentists,
doctors, clairvoyants, and a whole host of folk whose names would
never be in the papers until their burial permits were issued.

Miss Clarissa did a very peculiar thing. It was already four o'clock
of a Saturday afternoon. Instead of immediately giving the package
into the hands of the delivery department, she retained it and, at
closing time, going to the room where ready made uniforms for
messenger boys were kept, she purloined one. Now it must be known that
the principal reason for doing a thing so unusual, not to say
indiscreet, was her desire to obey the young man's injunction to hand
the razors into his own hands and no others. She had become possessed
of the idea that some disaster would befall if the razors came into
the possession of any one else. Moreover, the stranger had humbled her
in the contest of repartee, which, as a true woman, had made her
entertain an admiration for him, and this and his strange disguises
and his unaccountable purchases had surrounded him with a mist of
romantic mystery she fain would penetrate. Some little time before, it
had been Miss Clarissa's misfortune, through sickness, to lose much of
her hair. It had now begun to grow again and resume its former
luxuriant abundance, but by removing se