ask after her health and well-being,
and she writes back to him. That is all the communication they are ever
likely to have with each other. The music they once played together will
never sound again. Its last notes have long since faded away and the
last words of this story, trembling on the lips of the teller, may now
fade with them.

THE NINTH DAY.

A LITTLE change in the weather. The rain still continues, but the wind
is not quite so high. Have I any reason to believe, because it is calmer
on land, that it is also calmer at sea? Perhaps not. But my mind is
scarcely so uneasy to-day, nevertheless.

I had looked over the newspaper with the usual result, and had laid it
down with the customary sense of disappointment, when Jessie handed me a
letter which she had received that morning. It was written by her aunt,
and it upbraided her in the highly exaggerated terms which ladies love
to employ, where any tender interests of their own are concerned, for
her long silence and her long absence from home. Home! I thought of my
poor boy and of the one hope on which all his happiness rested, and I
felt jealous of the word when I saw it used persuasively in a letter to
our guest. What right had any one to mention "home" to her until George
had spoken first?

"I must answer it by return of post," said Jessie, with a tone of sorrow
in her voice for which my heart warmed to her. "You have been very kind
to me; you have taken more pains to interest and amuse me than I am
worth. I can laugh about most things, but I can't laugh about going
away. I am honestly and sincerely too grateful for that."

She paused, came round to where I was sitting, perched herself on the
end of the table, and, resting her hands on my shoulders, added gently:

"It must be the day after to-morrow, must it not?"

I could not trust myself to answer. If I had spoken, I should have
betrayed George's secret in spite of myself.

"To-morrow is the tenth day," she went on, softly. "It looks so selfish
and so ungrateful to go the moment I have heard the last of the stories,
that I am quite distressed at being obliged to enter on the subject at
all. And yet, what choice is left me? what can I do when my aunt writes
to me in that way?"

She took up the letter again, and looked at it so ruefully that I drew
her head a little nearer to me, and gratefully kissed the smooth white
forehead.

"If your aunt is only half as anxious to see you again, my love, as