city went on as though she still were in it. With
unfeeling regularity the sun rose out of the East River. On Broadway
electric-light signs flashed, street-cars pursued each other, taxicabs
bumped and skidded, women, and even men, dared to look happy, and had
apparently taken some thought to their attire. They did not respect even
his widowerhood. They smiled upon him, and asked him jocularly about the
farm and his "crops," and what he was doing in New York. He pitied them,
for obviously they were ignorant of the fact that in New York there were
art galleries, shops, restaurants of great interest, owing to the fact
that Polly Kirkland had visited them. They did not know that on upper
Fifth Avenue were houses of which she had deigned to approve, or which
she had destroyed with ridicule, and that to walk that avenue and halt
before each of these houses was an inestimable privilege.

Each day, with pathetic vigilance, Ainsley examined his heart for the
promised sign. But so far from telling him that the change he longed
for had taken place, his heart grew heavier, and as weeks went by and
no sign appeared, what little confidence he had once enjoyed passed with
them.

But before hope entirely died, several false alarms had thrilled him
with happiness. One was a cablegram from Gibraltar in which the only
words that were intelligible were "congratulate" and "engagement." This
lifted him into an ecstasy of joy and excitement, until, on having the
cable company repeat the message, he learned it was a request from Miss
Kirkland to congratulate two mutual friends who had just announced
their engagement, and of whose address she was uncertain. He had hardly
recovered from this disappointment than he was again thrown into a
tumult by the receipt of a mysterious package from the custom-house
containing an intaglio ring. The ring came from Italy, and her ship
had touched at Genoa. The fact that it was addressed in an unknown
handwriting did not disconcert him, for he argued that to make the test
more difficult she might disguise the handwriting. He at once carried
the intaglio to an expert at the Metropolitan Museum, and when he was
told that it represented Cupid feeding a fire upon an altar, he reserved
a stateroom on the first steamer bound for the Mediterranean. But before
his ship sailed, a letter, also from Italy, from his aunt Maria, who was
spending the winter in Rome, informed him that the ring was a Christmas
gift from her.