and joined her rapidly. I
shuddered again, but this time a sort of dread was mingled with that
strange shivering. I knew what was coming, and it came. Again that voice
in my ear. "Look and remember!" it said. I passed the man and woman as
they stopped at their first meeting!

"Is all right, George?" said the female.

"All right, my girl," was the reply.

I looked. An evil smile, as if of wicked triumph, was on the man's face,
I thought. And on the woman's? I looked at her, and I remembered. I
could not be mistaken. Spite of her change in manner, dress, and
appearance, it was Mary Simms. This woman some years before, when she
was still very young, had been a sort of humble companion to my mother.
A simple-minded, honest girl, we thought her. Sometimes I had fancied
that she had paid me, in a sly way, a marked attention. I had been
foolish enough to be flattered by her stealthy glances and her sighs.
But I had treated these little demonstrations of partiality as due only
to a silly girlish fancy. Mary Simms, however, had come to grief in our
household. She had been detected in the abstraction of sundry jewels and
petty ornaments. The morning after discovery she had left the house, and
we had heard of her no more. As these recollections passed rapidly
through my mind I looked behind me. The couple had turned back. I turned
to follow again; and spite of carriages and cabs, and shouts and oaths
of drivers, I took the middle of the street in order to pass the man and
woman at a little distance unobserved. No; I was not mistaken. The woman
was Mary Simms, though without any trace of all her former
simple-minded airs; Mary Simms, no longer in her humble attire, but
flaunting in all the finery of overdone fashion. She wore an air of
reckless joyousness in her face; and yet, spite of that, I pitied her.
It was clear she had fallen on the evil ways of bettered
fortune--bettered, alas! for the worse.

I had an excuse now, in my own mind, for my continued pursuit, without
deeming myself an utter madman--the excuse of curiosity to know the
destiny of one with whom I had been formerly familiar, and in whom I had
taken an interest. Presently the game I was hunting down stopped at the
door of the Grand Cafe. After a little discussion they entered. It was a
public place of entertainment; there was no reason why I should not
enter also. I found my way to the first floor. They were already seated
at a table, Mary holding the _carte_ i