leaves us at the outset of our new lives.

I am with my mother, beginning my career as a country gentleman
on the estate in Perthshire which I have inherited from Mr.
Germaine. Mary is with her husband, enjoying her new privileges,
learning her new duties, as a wife. She, too, is living in
Scotland--living, by a strange fatality, not very far distant
from my country-house. I have no suspicion that she is so near to
me: the name of Mrs. Van Brandt (even if I had heard it) appeals
to no familiar association in my mind. Still the kindred spirits
are parted. Still there is no idea on her side, and no idea on
mine, that we shall ever meet again.

CHAPTER VII.

THE WOMAN ON THE BRIDGE.

MY mother looked in at the library door, and disturbed me over my
books.

"I have been hanging a little picture in my room," she said.
"Come upstairs, my dear, and give me your opinion of it."

I rose and followed her. She pointed to a miniature portrait,
hanging above the mantelpiece.

"Do you know whose likeness that is?" she asked, half sadly, half
playfully. "George! Do you really not recognize yourself at
thirteen years old?"

How should I recognize myself? Worn by sickness and sorrow;
browned by the sun on my long homeward voyage; my hair already
growing thin over my forehead; my eyes already habituated to
their one sad and weary look; what had I in common with the fair,
plump, curly-headed, bright-eyed boy who confronted me in the
miniature? The mere sight of the portrait produced the most
extraordinary effect on my mind. It struck me with an
overwhelming melancholy; it filled me with a despair of myself
too dreadful to be endured. Making the best excuse I could to my
mother, I left the room. In another minute I was out of the
house.

I crossed the park, and left my own possessions behind me.
Following a by-road, I came to our well-known river; so beautiful
in itself, so famous among trout-fishers throughout Scotland. It
was not then the fishing season. No human being was in sight as I
took my seat on the bank. The old stone bridge which spanned the
stream was within a hundred yards of me; the setting sun still
tinged the swift-flowing water under the arches with its red and
dying light.

Still the boy's face in the miniature pursued me. Still the
portrait seemed to reproach me in a merciless language of its
own: "Look at what you were once; think of what you are now!"

I hid my face in the soft, fragrant grass. I thought of the
wasted years of my life between thirteen and twenty-three.

How was it to end? If I lived to the ordinary life of man, what
prospect had I before me?

Love? Marriage? I burst out laughing as the idea crossed my mind.
Since the innocently happy days of my boyhood I had known no more
of love than the insect that now crept over my hand as it lay on
the grass. My money, to be sure, would buy me a wife; but would
my money make her dear to me? dear as Mary had once been, in the
golden time when my portrait was first painted?

Mary! Was she still living? Was she married? Should I know her
again if I saw her? Absurd! I had not seen her since she was ten
years old: she was now a woman, as I was a man. Would she know
_me_ if we met? The portrait, still pursuing me, answered the
question: "Look at what you were once; think of what you are
now!"

I rose and walked backward and forward, and tried to turn the
current of my thoughts in some new direction.

It was not to be done. After a banishment of years, Mary had got
back again into my mind. I sat down once more on the river bank.
The sun was sinking fast. Black shadows hovered under the arches
of the old stone bridge. The red light had faded from the
swift-flowing water, and had left it overspread with one
monotonous hue of steely gray. The first stars looked down
peacefully from the cloudless sky. The first shiverings of the
night breeze were audible among the trees, and visible here and
there in the shallow places of the stream. And still, the darker
it grew, the more persistently my portrait led me back to the
past, the more vividly the long-lost image of the child Mary
showed itself to me in my thoughts.

Was this the prelude of her coming back to me in dreams; in her
perfected womanhood, in the young prime of her life?

It might be so.

I was no longer unworthy of her, as I had once been. The effect
produced on me by the sight of my portrait was in itself due to
moral and mental changes in me for the better, which had been
steadily proceeding since the time when my wound had laid me


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