so naturally from our life-long intimacy, that I had not the slightest suspicion of the change which had come over me.  But the hour of waking was at hand.  We had looked forward to the settled summer weather for a marked improvement in his health.  But June had come and he still seemed very delicate.  His physician prescribed travelling and change of climate; and though his high spirits had deceived me as to his real danger, I urged him to go.  He left us to visit an elder brother residing in one of the Middle States.  Ten years this very month!” added Aunt Linny, with an absent air.

“Ten years ago this very month,” I exclaimed, “did my distinguished self arrive at this venerable mansion.  What a singular conjunction of events!  No doubt our horoscopes would reveal some strange entanglement of destinies at this point.  Perchance I, even I, was ‘the star malign’ whose rising disturbed the harmonious movement of the spheres!”

“No doubt of it; the birth of a mouse once caused an earthquake, you know.”

“But could I have seen him?  Did I arrive before he had left?”

“Oh, yes, very likely; but of course you can have no recollection of him, such a chit as you were then.”

“What was his name?” I cried, eagerly.  A long-silent chord of memory began to give forth a vague, uncertain murmur.

“Oh, no matter, Kate.  I would a little rather you shouldn’t know.  It doesn’t affect the moral of the story, which was all I had in view in relating it.”

“A plague take the moral, Aunty!  The romance is what I want; and what’s that without ’the magic of a name’?”

“Excuse me.”

“Tell me his Christian name, then,—­just for a peg to hang my ideas on; that is, if it’s meat for romance.  If it is Isaac or Jonathan, you needn’t mention it.”

“Well, then, you tease,—­I called him Cousin Harry.”

“Cousin Harry!” I screamed, starting forward, and staring at her with eyes wide open.

“Yes; but what ails you, child?  You glare upon me like a maniac.”

“Hush! hush! don’t speak!” said I.

As I sunk back, in a sort of dream, into the rocking-chair in which I had been idling, the garden caught my eye through the open window.  The gate overarched with honeysuckle, the long alley with its fragrant flowering border, the grape arbor, the steep green hill behind, lay before me in the still, rich beauty of June.  In a twinkling, memory had swept the dust from my little cabinet picture, and let in upon it a sudden light.  The ten intervening years vanished like a dream, and that long-forgotten garden scene started up, vivid as in the hour when it actually passed before my eyes.  The clue to that mystery which had so spellbound my childish fancy was at length found.  I sat for a time in silence, lost in a delicious, confused reverie.

“The Button-Rose was a gift from him, then?” were my first words.

“What, Kate?” said Aunt Linny, now opening her large blue eyes with a strange look.