With these words on his lips he went out of the room, went away from her, with the sullen determination to hate those two who had wronged him, until the end of his days.

He left the house at once and walked rapidly in the direction of Acquishnett. All night long he plodded blindly along the country roads, with no feeling of fatigue, no consciousness of his surroundings.

It was daylight when he eventually came to a recognition of his whereabouts and retraced his steps. His clothes were white with dust, and his face wan and haggard. One of the sour-faced maid-servants was cleaning the front steps when he went in, and gasped at him aghast, but he scarcely saw her. He made his toilet with a halí-mechanical sense of the proprieties, and then went down to that very ordinary parlor which a little while ago had seemed to him such a pleasant, home-like room.

There was a solitary breakfast laid for one, and instead of Julia's presence, there was a little note addressed to him, a tender, pleading little letter, assuring him once again of her gratitude for his goodness to a friendless orphan, beseeching him once more to be generous, and telling him that, act toward her as he would, she would never cease to be his affectionate and grateful friend.

Three times he read the letter through, and then, with a fierce look of mingled hate and rage on his face, crushed it in his hand and flung it into the empty grate. Having done this, he determined to recommence his life upon a new system; to shut the false girl's image out of his mind and to devote all his energy and thought to his business.

The first letter he wrote when he took his seat as the head of the firm on the second day after his father's funeral was a brief, business-like epistle to Frank Ryder, informing him that his services were no longer required, and that if he preferred a pecuniary compensation in lieu of the ordinary

term of notice, such a course would be most agreeable to the new head of the firm of Braddon & Braddon.

The answer to this communication came very promptly. It told the new head of Braddon & Braddon that Mr. Ryder required neither notice nor compensation, and that he should have quitted the office forever before his note could be delivered to Mr. Braddon, Jr.

How far Roy Braddon succeeded in shutting out the image of the girl he loved was known only to himself. From the hour in which he left her on the night of his father's death, he had never spoken of her to any human creature. Whatever curiosity he may have felt as to her fate he kept harbored in his own mind, making no attempt to discover what had become of her. He lived on without change of any kind in the dull old mansion. Friends he had none. The only man who had ever been his companion was Frank Ryder.

So his life went on: Coming home every day to the same lonely rooms; eating and drinking in solitude; sitting alone through the long evening with a neglected book lying on the table beside him; or wandering alone in the familiar haunts that he had known in his rambles with Frank Ryder long ago. For any pleasure or variety there was in his life, he might as well have been a wretched slave toiling in the jungles of the Congo.

Ten years passed before he again saw Julia Torres. In a crowded street she flashed past him one afternoon-a tall, slim figure dressed in black, with great dark eyes and a wan, tired looking face. It was not until she had passed him some moments that he knew, by the quickened beating of his heart, who it was that had been so near him. Impelled by a half-recognized curiosity to learn the circumstances of her life, he turned and attempted to follow her; but she was lost in the crowd before he had been able to recover himself sufficiently to look about for her.

She was poor-he was sure of that; he had read as much in the one brief glance into her wan face. Poor and careworn, alone in the city streets; jostled by the crowd; probably hurrying home to some sordid refuge-she for whom life could have been one bright holiday, he thought bitterly.

He laughed aloud as he contrasted her probable misery with the home he could have given her; not that dull old house which had served as a home for his mother and grandmothers, but a suburban palace set in a fairy-land of gardens and flowers. How different life might have been for both of them, he reflected, had she loved him. He hated her with a double hatred as he thought of what they had both lost; hated her for the wrong done to herself, as well as for the wrong done to him. But still her face haunted him with its pinched, hungry look and its pitiful expression of constant sorrow.

From that time forward the face that had flashed past him in the street was always with him. She had haunted him before in her girlish grace and beauty; she came before him now like the sad shadow of her former self. But still he told himself that he hated her. What was her poverty to him? If she had been on her knees before him pleading for help he would have been deaf to her prayers. She had chosen for herself. Let her abide the issue.

A year later he saw her husband. A faint flush lit up Ryder's face as he recognized the son of his old employer. Involuntarily he opened his lips to speak to him, but Braddon brushed past him and hurried on, very pale and with a dark, forbidding countenance. Ryder, irresolute, looked after him for a moment, then gave a heavy sigh and walked on. Whatever vague hope had impelled him to approach his erstwhile friend died out at the sight of his pale, stern face.

Thus Roy Braddon twice lost the opportunity of ascertaining the fate of these two who had once been so dear to him. All the time his persistent nursing of his hatred made him more

moody and taciturn. He abjured all sentiment, but always when the anniversary of his father's death came around he felt a loneliness and isolation that made the grim old house a horror to him. The paneled walls seemed to close in on him like the walls of a vault.

The year following his meeting with Frank Ryder this anniversary seemed to affect him more than usual. He wandered into the library after dinner and tried to read, but a sudden paroxysm of despondency seized him and he flung his book aside and hurried from the house. Once in the open air, it mattered little to him where he went. The clocks were striking seven and the traffic of the day was almost over. He had the streets practically to himself. It was a supreme relief to him to escape from the silent, shadowy mansion, always haunted by the ghost of what once had been, and get out under the open sky. He walked on, careless of where he went, making his way through obscure streets and by-ways, until he found himself in a bleak, barren outskirt, where there was a ghastly patch of waste ground, intersected by shabby streets of newly built houses, the greater part of which seemed to be untenanted.

The exploration of this sordid neighborhood afforded him a fierce kind of amusement. Perhaps it was pleasant. for him, in his mood, to contrast the squalor which manifested itself in a hundred ways with his own prosperous condition. If he had no friends or none to share it with him, he could at least congratulate himself in the comparison of his lot with that of the people about him. He turned presently into a darker and lonelier street than the others. Here there were more vacant houses, and an air of desolation more profound than elsewhere, yet the houses were better and larger, and had little gardens around them.

The place was so silent that he could hear the low, suppressed sobbing of a child who was standing on the other side of the street, looking down at

something on the ground-a humble image of despair. He was not a hardhearted man in a general way, and could not witness the child's distress unmoved. He crossed the street quickly and went up to her. She was small and delicate looking, with an air of shabby gentility, and a pale, thoughtful little face; a girl who might have been any age, from eight to twelve.

"What is the matter, child?" he asked.

She looked up at him through her tears. "Oh, I don't know what to do," she sobbed, brokenly. "I dropped the bottle of medicine and it broke! And we haven't any money to get more. Mamma will have to go without the medicine, and she is-" She could not finish.

He had heard of children of the street who were taught to relate such incidents for the purpose of inducing charitable contributions from prosperous looking strangers, and for a moment he searched her face steadily, but such thoughts of her failed to find lodgment in his breast. There was something about her which inspired only confidence, and in the end a tender pity, which he had not known for years, actuated him.

"Come back to the druggist's with me," he said, taking her hand, “and I will get you another bottle."

"Oh, thank you!" she exclaimed, gratefully. Then after a moment, "but I ought not to take it from you-from a stranger. Mamma would make me take it back if she knew."

"Your mamma needn't know, unless you tell her. And if she is very sick and needs the medicine, it is your duty to take it and not tell her."

She looked up into his face doubtfully for a moment; then she gave his hand a confident little squeeze and followed him without a word. They were a considerable distance from the drug store and he had time to study her as she walked along beside him, looking up into his face and answering all his questions with a meek gratitude that

touched him profoundly. For the first time he realized how hard the lot of the poor must be when such a trifling service seemed so much to one of them.

The girl was eleven years old, she told him, and the eldest of a family of three-two boys and a girl. Her father was dead, and her mother had been sick for the past month; it was her heart, the doctors said.

All this she told him with childish frankness, and yet with the womanly tones of a child whom hard experience had made older than her years. They found the drug store still open and had the prescription made up again. Then he went home with her. His interest in her had become all absorbent, and he felt a great curiosity to see where she lived. Such a child might have been his, he reflected, if Julia Torres had not proved unfaithful.

A dim light was shining from one of the front windows when they arrived at her home. She led him into a bare, wretched room, the furniture of which was of the scantiest and shabbiest. An unkempt woman, carrying a candle, emerged from the back premises as they entered.

"What a long time you have been, Mary," she exclaimed, looking curiously at Braddon. "Your ma has been frightened about you."

"I stumbled, and broke the medicine," said the little girl, lowering her voice almost to a whisper.

"Broke it!" exclaimed the woman. "And not another cent in the house. Oh, Mary!"

"But this gentleman got another bottle for me," the child hastened to add. "You must thank him, Sally."

"Indeed I will," said the woman, heartily. "It was very kind of you, sir. I don't know what we should have done. Her mother is very sick."

"Isn't she any better, Sally?" asked the little girl, eagerly.

"She's been very quiet; but she's always that. Complaints never pass her lips. And the children have all gone to bed-where you should be, too. My, it's nearly 11 o'clock."

"Yes," put in Braddon. "It's too late for this child to be about. And she seems far from strong."

"Ah, sir," said the woman, shaking her head sadly, "if you knew what that child goes through and how patient she is, and what an old head for her years she has, you would not wonder that she doesn't look strong. She's kept the home together somehow, when things must have all gone to nothin' if it hadn't been for her."

Braddon turned his eyes from a curious survey of the meager appointments of the room and looked at the girl. She had such an air of grace and refinement in her premature womanliness that he was more interested in her than he could have believed it possible for him to be in any creature so far removed from himself. He touched her hair caressingly.

"I'll come back to-morrow evening to inquire how your mother is," he said, "if you do not object."

"I should be very grateful to you," she answered, in her quaint, grown-up manner. "I'll take this medicine up to mamma now. And I'll remember what you said," she added, as she left the

room.

Braddon followed the woman to the front door, and as he passed out slipped a five dollar bill into her hand. He had felt, somehow, that he could not offer money to the child, although she had so freely confessed their poverty.

He thought of her many times the next day in the midst of his business. She had awakened an interest in him which lifted, though ever so little, the flood-gates of affection which had been pent up in his heart for so many years. At dusk he drove to the house in a cab, carrying all manner of small luxuries which he fancied might be appreciated by the invalid, and the sensation of doing something personally for another brought with it a satisfaction he had never before experienced. He was not content even with this, but catching sight of an attractive shop window on his way, stopped the cab and bought a glittering work-box for his little favor

ite. He was certain that it would please her vastly, even if it were not of much use to her.

He found the room into which he had been shown the previous evening very neat and tidy, and the little girl at work on some sewing by the light of a tall stand lamp, which made her look very small, indeed. He was evidently expected, and she flushed with pleasure when the elderly woman led him in; and her rapture was unbounded when she saw what he had brought.

"Oh," she cried, her eyes shining as she took out the contents of the basket, "the doctor has said so often that mamma ought to have wine, and we couldn't give it to her. You are like an angel come down from heaven!"

He waited until she had taken her mother some of the wine and fruit he had brought, and learned how she had enjoyed it, and then went away with the thanks of the little girl ringing in his ears, and smiling at her delight in her new work-box.

After that Roy Braddon became a very frequent visitor in the little home. He contrived to ascertain the name and address of the landlord from the woman Sally, and paid the rent for the cottage three months in advance. He caused some furniture which had been stored in the attic of his home for years to be sent out to them. Very rarely did he appear empty handed, and he exhibited a marvelous ingenuity in the judicious selection and variety of his offerings. The younger children had been presented to him, and he catered to their small wants with an almost child-like delight in childish things. It was so new to him to be interested in any human creature; so new for him to live out of himself.

As his intimacy with Mary increased, she told him a great deal of her mother's struggles to earn a living for them, and of the kindness of Sally, who was a near neighbor; until he felt that he had more than a charitable interest in the little household. And when the time came finally that the invalid was able to sit up for a few hours

daily, he was as glad as the rest of them.

"Mamma will be downstairs to-morrow," Mary told him one evening. "And she wants you to come and have tea with us, so that she can thank you."

"I don't want any thanks, my dear," he answered. "What I have done has been for my own pleasure. But I shall be glad to see your mother."

He found the little girl watching for him at the gate the next evening when he arrived, bleak and cold as the weather was, without hat or coat, her bright auburn hair blowing in the wintry wind. She waved to him joyfully. "Everything is ready," she cried, "and the parlor looks so nice mamma won't know it. She'll think the fairies have been at work. Come and see! She's not down yet, but she will be in a few minutes."

Braddon took his seat where Mary indicated the post of honor, opposite the invalid's sofa. Her radiant, joyous face moved him deeply. To think that such small things could give such happiness and he had missed it! That was always the burden of his thoughts at such times.

Presently there came the sound of light, feeble steps upon the stairs, and the faint rustling of a woman's dress. The door was opened softly, and a woman entered-a tall, pale woman, with dark, luminous eyes.

"Julia!"

She echoed his cry faintly, and tottered a few paces forward as if she would have fallen at his feet. But he caught her in his arms and held her to his breast. All thought of his hate of her had vanished. Her wan, drawn face, beautiful to him still, even in the wreck of her loveliness, shut out all else save that she was the only woman he had ever loved.

After a moment he led her to the couch and seated himself beside her, while the child looked on with wideopen, astonished eyes.

"I don't want to know anything of your past, Julia," he whispered, "only why it is that you are not living under his name."

"Didn't you know?" she faltered, a flush overspreading her face. "It was in the papers. He-he-took some money that was not his, and they sent him to prison. I moved and changed my name to save my children from disgrace.'

"Then he is-"

"He died shortly after he entered the prison," she said. "And you, Roy?"

"I want you to come back home and take your old place," he said tenderly. "Just as if nothing had ever happened, and all of this had never been. I want this little girl, who has made a new man of me, to be with me always."

For answer she laid her head upon his shoulder, and Mary came over and nestled against his knee.