This was my plot:  Mrs. Rayne had been reading a book that I had bought for the home-voyage, and was to finish it before evening.  I selected the duplicate of the paper which “Waitstill Atwood Eliot” had put in a bottle and cast adrift when her case had been desperate, and laid it in the book a page or two beyond Mrs. Rayne’s mark.  It seemed impossible that she could miss it:  I watched her as a chemist watches his first experiment.

Twice she took up the book, and was interrupted before she could open it:  the third time she sat down so close to me that the folds of her dress touched mine.  One page, two pages:  in another instant she would have turned the leaf, and I held my breath, when a servant brought in a note.  Her most intimate friend had been thrown from her carriage, and had sent for her.  It was a matter of life and death, and brooked no delay.  In ten minutes she had bidden us a cordial good-bye, and dropped out of my life for all time.

She never finished my book, nor I hers.  I had had it in my heart, in return for her warm hospitality, to cast a great stone out of her past life into the still waters of her present, and her good angel had turned it aside just before it reached her.  I might have asked Mr. Rayne in so many words if his wife’s name had been Waitstill Atwood Eliot when he married her, but that would have savored of treachery to her, and I refrained.

Often in the long calm days of the home-voyage, and oftener still in the night-watches, I pondered in my heart the items of Mrs. Rayne’s history, and pieced them together like bits of mosaic—­the gray eyes and the gray dress, the identity of name, the indefinite terrors of her sea-voyage, the little touch concerning Lancelot and Guinevere, her emotion when I mentioned the Sapphire.  If circumstantial evidence can be trusted, I feel certain that Pedro’s ghost appeared to me in the flesh.

ELLA WILLIAMS THOMPSON.

REMINISCENCES OF FLORENCE.

I had six months more to stay on the Continent, and I began for the first time to be discontented in Paris.  There was no soul in that great city whom I had ever seen before, but this alone would hot have been sufficient to make me long for a change, except for an accident which unluckily surrounded me with my own countrymen.  These I did not go abroad to see; and having lived almost entirely in the society of the French for over two years, it was with dismay that I saw my sanctum invaded daily by twos and threes of the aimless American nonentities who presume that their presence must be agreeable to any of their countrymen, and especially to any countrywoman, after a chance introduction on the boulevard or an hour spent together in a cafe.

“Seeing these things,” I determined to leave Paris, and the third day after found me traveling through picturesque Savoy toward Mont Cenis.  All the afternoon the rugged hills had been growing higher and whiter with snow, and now, just before sunset, we reached the railway terminus, St. Michel, and were under the shadow of the Alps themselves.