on the next Sunday and the next she was absent from her accustomed
place. Such a thing had not happened before since he had first seen her.
He was filled with the first real anxiety he had ever known. Here was a
mystery in which there was no charm!

The Wednesday after the second Sunday upon which he had missed her was a
day dropped out of heaven. The mild, early summer air that floated
through the open windows into the gloomy, oak-ceiled schoolroom, was
ambrosial with the breathings of flowers. Young Edgar could not fix his
thoughts upon the page before him. The out-of-door world was calling to
him. He found himself listening to the birds in the trees outside and
gazing through the narrow, pointed windows at the waving branches.

Suddenly his heart stopped. The deep, sweet, hollow, ghostlike voice of
the bell in the steeple, tolling for a funeral, was borne to his ears.
In a moment his fevered imagination associated the tolling with the
absence of his divinity from her pew, and in spite of passionately
assuring himself that it could not be, and recalling how lovely and full
of health she had been when he saw her through the gate, he was
possessed by deep melancholy.

The days and hours until Sunday seemed an age to him--an age of
foreboding and dread--but they at last passed by. In a fever of anxiety,
he walked with the rest of the boys to church, and mounted the steps to
the school gallery.

It was early; few of the worshippers had arrived, but in a little while
there was a stir near the door. A group of figures shrouded in the black
habiliments of woe were moving up the aisle--were entering _her_ pew,
from which alas, _she_ was again absent!

_Then he knew_--knew that she would enter that sacred place
_nevermore_!

After the service there were inquiries as to the cause of a commotion in
the gallery occupied by the Manor House School, and it was said in reply
that the weather being excessively hot for the season, one of the boys
had fainted.

CHAPTER V.

The June following young Edgar's eleventh birthday found him in Richmond
once more. The village-like little capital was all greenery and roses
and sunshine and bird-song and light-hearted laughter, and he felt, with
a glow, that it was good to be back.

In the five years of his absence he had grown quite tall for his age,
with a certain dignity and self-possession of bearing acquired from
becoming accustomed to depend upon himself. All that was lef