beautiful emerald ring she always wore. "She said
she had left it to him, and he had asked that she would send it to me.
It had been her own engagement ring."

"Why don't you wear it on your engaged finger?"

"I did at first. It was a kind of comfort to me. But Uncle Tom was
constantly vexed with me about it. He said it might keep things off. He
is a very practical person, Uncle Tom, a very shrewd man of business,
I'm told. So, to please him, I wear it in the daytime on my right hand."

By this time I was shedding tears of sheer sensibility.

"I have thought of him day and night; there has not been a night I have
not remembered him in my prayers for nearly twenty years. It will be
twenty years next April. How could I begin to think of any one else
_now_, Colonel Stoddart or any one? Uncle Tom is very clever, and so is
your Uncle Thomas, but I don't think they have ever _quite_ understood
what I feel about Mr. Kingston."

An electric bell in a little box over the door rang in a furious manner.

Aunt Emmy was on her feet in a second, smoothing her fair hair at the
Venetian mirror.

"Your Uncle Thomas is awake," she said, "and is ready to be read to. He
never likes being kept waiting."

This seemed to be the case, for as she left the room the electric bell
rang again more furiously than before, and I shook my fist at it.

PART II

If some star of heaven
Led him by at even,
If some magic fate
Brought him, should I wait,
Or fly within and bid them close the gate?

MARGARET L. WOODS.

The following year I suddenly married a soldier, the only young man I
knew, and I knew him very slightly, and went out to India with him. I
did not forget Aunt Emmy, we corresponded regularly; but I was young
and my life was a very full one. I had seen nothing of the world till I
married. I had a child. The years rushed past, joyful, miserable, vivid,
surprising, happy years, in spite of the fact that my husband was not
remarkably like Lord K----in appearance, and not in the least like the
"plaister saint" with whom I had hurried to the altar on such slight
provocation.

During these years Uncle Thomas died, and Uncle Tom married, and Aunt
Emmy wrote to me that she had taken a little cottage in Abinger Forest
against her brother's advice, and how, in spite of his opposition--how
much it must have cost her to oppose him--he had forgiven her and
presented her with the most expensive mahogany beds