He returned to his desk and began to rearrange the contents of the little drawer.  Among them was a small sandalwood box which had been their mother’s, and which Stella had prized with special fondness.  He had never opened it since her death, but as he lifted it now the frail clasp gave way, the lid fell back, and the contents slipped upon the desk.  They were few:  a ring, a thin gold locket containing the miniatures of their father and mother, a small tintype of himself taken when he first left home, and two or three notes addressed in a handwriting which he recognized as Wayland’s.  He replaced them with reverent touch, turning away even in thought from what he had never meant to see.

By and by he heard in the distance the roll of carriages returning from the Fieldings’ reception.  He replenished the fire generously, found a long cloak in the closet at the end of the hall, and waited the sound of wheels before his own door.  “The rain has grown heavier,” he said, drawing the cloak around his wife as she descended from the carriage.  Something in his manner seemed to envelop her.  He brought her into the study and seated her before the fire.  She had expected to find the house silent; the glow and warmth of the room were grateful after the chill and darkness outside, her husband’s presence after that vague sense of futility which the evening’s gayety had left upon her.

“I suppose I ought to tell you about the party,” she said, a little wearily; “but if you don’t mind, I will wait till breakfast.  Everybody was there, of course, and it was all very fine, as we all knew it would be.  I hope you’ve enjoyed your Latin poets more.”

“They are Greek, dear,” he said.  “I have been making translations from some of them now and then.  Some day we will take a day off and then I’ll read them to you.  But neither the party nor the poets to-night.  See, it is almost two o’clock.”

“I knew it must be late.  But you look as fresh as a child that has just waked from sleep.”

“Perhaps I have just waked.”

They rose to go up-stairs.  “I will go in front and make a light in our room while you turn off the gas in the hall.”

He paused for a moment after she had gone out and turned to a page in the Greek Anthology for a single stanza.  Shelley’s translation was written in pencil beside it: 

    Thou wert the morning star among the living,
      Ere thy fair light had fled;
    Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus giving
      New splendor to the dead.

The Perfect Year

BY ELEANOR A. HALLOWELL

When Dolly Leonard died, on the night of my debutante party, our little community was aghast.  If I live to be a thousand, I shall never outgrow the paralyzing shock of that disaster.  I think that the girls in our younger set never fully recovered from it.