“You are married, I believe—happily so, I trust,” I ventured, after a moment.

“My husband is very kind,” she replied. “I am quite content, thank you. We have two children.”

“I suppose you know the whole story,” I added, after a pause, “the stolen letter, his suffering and his unaltered love.”

“Yes, sir, I know it all now,” she said, weeping. “The good person who preached the funeral sermon to-day wrote me the sad story a few weeks ago. It was he, too, who telegraphed George’s death, and influenced his parents to defer the funeral until now. I arrived only at noon to-day. Oh! sir,” she continued, “I try to think it is all for the best. I pray to heaven to help me to be true and good to my kind and affectionate husband, and to make me worthy of my pure and guileless little ones, but I sometimes fear that I have only a shattered heart left to love them with.”

We shook hands and separated, probably forever. I went back to my key, she back to Iowa, her husband and little ones, and her great sorrow. And that ends the story, unless I add an odd fancy of my own.

Sometimes when the house is hushed, and midnight draws near, I sit and smoke and dream. Watching the clouds as they curl upward from my cigar, or peering through the smoke-rings I blow forth, I see hopes and joys I have not met, which, as they vanish in the haze, leave my cheeks wet. And as I sit and muse anon, my mind flits back to a quiet, rustic village, and I hear the winds softly sighing through the pines above a solitary grave on a hill-side. Looking west, I see a sweet sad-faced matron sitting beneath a cottage portico, and happy gleeful children are about her. Then I listen to the pines again, and I fancy I hear them whisper,

and as I turn once more, I see her yet again—waiting, waiting, waiting.