dazzling smile, she looked up.

"Are you sure it is not you who are blind?" she said.

That was all, but it was enough, for it told me that, unaccountable,
incredible as it was, this radiant daughter of a golden age had
bestowed upon me not alone her pity, but her love. Still, I half
believed I must be under some blissful hallucination even as I clasped
her in my arms. "If I am beside myself," I cried, "let me remain so."

"It is I whom you must think beside myself," she panted, escaping from
my arms when I had barely tasted the sweetness of her lips. "Oh! oh!
what must you think of me almost to throw myself in the arms of one I
have known but a week? I did not mean that you should find it out so
soon, but I was so sorry for you I forgot what I was saying. No, no;
you must not touch me again till you know who I am. After that, sir,
you shall apologize to me very humbly for thinking, as I know you do,
that I have been over quick to fall in love with you. After you know
who I am, you will be bound to confess that it was nothing less than my
duty to fall in love with you at first sight, and that no girl of
proper feeling in my place could do otherwise."

As may be supposed, I would have been quite content to waive
explanations, but Edith was resolute that there should be no more
kisses until she had been vindicated from all suspicion of precipitancy
in the bestowal of her affections, and I was fain to follow the lovely
enigma into the house. Having come where her mother was, she blushingly
whispered something in her ear and ran away, leaving us together.

It then appeared that, strange as my experience had been, I was now
first to know what was perhaps its strangest feature. From Mrs. Leete I
learned that Edith was the great-granddaughter of no other than my lost
love, Edith Bartlett. After mourning me for fourteen years, she had
made a marriage of esteem, and left a son who had been Mrs. Leete's
father. Mrs. Leete had never seen her grandmother, but had heard much
of her, and, when her daughter was born, gave her the name of Edith.
This fact might have tended to increase the interest which the girl
took, as she grew up, in all that concerned her ancestress, and
especially the tragic story of the supposed death of the lover, whose
wife she expected to be, in the conflagration of his house. It was a
tale well calculated to touch the sympathy of a romantic girl, and the
fact that the blood of the unfortunate heroine was