s this really
the first time I have seen you?"

She put her little trembling hand into mine; I lifted it to my lips, and
kissed it. Sorely was I tempted to own that I had pitied and loved her
in her infancy. It was almost on my lips to say: "I remember you an
easily-pleased little creature, amusing yourself with the broken toys
which were once the playthings of my own children." I believe I should
have said it, if I could have trusted myself to speak composedly to
her. This was not to be done. Old as I was, versed as I was in the hard
knowledge of how to keep the mask on in the hour of need, this was not
to be done.

Still trying to understand that I was little better than a stranger to
her, and still bent on finding the secret of the sympathy that united
us, Eunice put a strange question to me.

"When you were young yourself," she said, "did you know what it was to
love, and to be loved--and then to lose it all?"

It is not given to many men to marry the woman who has been the object
of their first love. My early life had been darkened by a sad story;
never confided to any living creature; banished resolutely from my own
thoughts. For forty years past, that part of my buried self had lain
quiet in its grave--and the chance touch of an innocent hand had raised
the dead, and set us face to face again! Did I know what it was to
love, and to be loved, and then to lose it all? "Too well, my child; too
well!"

That was all I could say to her. In the last days of my life, I shrank
from speaking of it. When I had first felt that calamity, and had
felt it most keenly, I might have given an answer worthier of me, and
worthier of her.

She dropped my hand, and sat by me in silence, thinking. Had I--without
meaning it, God knows!--had I disappointed her?

"Did you expect me to tell my own sad story," I said, "as frankly and as
trustfully as you have told yours?"

"Oh, don't think that! I know what an effort it was to you to answer me
at all. Yes, indeed! I wonder whether I may ask something. The sorrow
you have just told me of is not the only one--is it? You have had other
troubles?"

"Many of them."

"There are times," she went on, "when one can't help thinking of one's
own miserable self. I try to be cheerful, but those times come now and
then."

She stopped, and looked at me with a pale fear confessing itself in her
face.

"You know who Selina is?" she resumed. "My friend! The only friend I
had, till you came