you staying at
Hope Terrace?"

"I shall be for a few days."

A silence fell between them. There was no one else in the street; and
their steps sounded with a steady tramp, as if they might walk on to
some definite end.

"Jack, dear old friend, after requiting your tender love to my exacting
and selfish boyhood with a pitiless treachery that will always shame my
manhood, I wonder if I dare ask it back, if I dare come to you."

"There is nothing to give back. I do believe I have kept up a sort of
girlish hankering for you. And now, if I can do any thing, if you are in
any perplexity"--

"Come up to Hope Terrace, and take tea with me. I want to talk to you
all the evening. You have just the same mesmeric strength that used to
soothe me when a boy. What a milk-and-water cub I must have been! I
wonder you did not throw me over."

Jack laughed.

"Let us turn back to Kit Connelly's, and I can send a message home, so
that mother will not keep tea waiting."

That done, they strolled on together the same path by which Fred had
come. The sun had dropped down behind the hill, and the glowing tints
had faded to purple-black and indistinct grays. They wound around the
hills, and came up to the very gate where their last good-by had been
uttered. And Fred remembered then that this was the first time Jack had
shared the hospitality of Hope Terrace, now when it was no longer his.

Mrs. Milroy gave them some supper in a pretty little apartment which had
been the servants' parlor, and was now hers. Then they went up to Fred's
room, which had been opened and aired. Some of its choicest belongings
had been taken away, but another than Fred would not have remarked this.
And here they renewed the remembrances of the years that had fallen
between.

"It seems cowardly to come to you in trouble, and to take so large a
share of your sympathy again," Fred said with his good-night. "But you
always were so strong and earnest."

He went down to the mill the next day, and was much interested in the
working of Jack's plans.

"You found your place," he said with a curious intonation, as if he half
envied the man before him.

"Yet in all truth I should not have chosen this," Jack answered with
honest gravity. "But, when I found circumstances would keep me here, I
resolved to work at it persistently and faithfully; and I learned in it
the larger lesson of the true dignity of labor. If I should solve my
problem successfully, I can ask no