Her face was frightfully pale, but her voice did not tremble as she gave him her hand, and said gently, “Go, then, my friend.  I do not love you.”

He took her hand, held it close for a moment, and then, without another look or word, put it tenderly down, and was gone.

So absorbed was he in painful thought that, passing down the long avenue with bent head, he did not notice, nor even see, a gentleman who, coming from the opposite direction, looked at him at first carelessly, and then searchingly, as he went by.

This gentleman, a man in the prime of life, handsome, stately, and evidently at home here, scrutinized the stranger with a singular intensity,—­made a movement as though he would speak to him,—­and then, drawing back, went with hasty steps towards the house.

Had Willie looked up, beheld this face and its expression, returned the scrutiny of the one, and comprehended the meaning of the other, while memory recalled a picture once held in his hands, some things now obscured would have been revealed to him, and a problem been solved.  As it was, he saw nothing, moved mechanically onward to the carriage, seated himself and said, “Home!”

This young man was neither presumptuous nor vain.  He had been once repulsed and but now utterly rejected.  He had no reason to hope, and yet—­perhaps it was his poetical and imaginative temperament—­he could not resign himself to despair.

Suddenly he started with an exclamation that was almost a cry.  What was it?  He remembered that, more than two years ago, on the last day he had been with her, he had begged the copy of a duet which they sometimes sang.  It was in manuscript, and he desired to have it written out by her own hand.  He had before petitioned, and she promised it; and when he thus again spoke of it, she laughed, and said, “What a memory it is, to be sure!  I shall have to tie a bit of string on my finger to refresh it.”

“Is that efficacious?” he had asked.

“Doubtless,” she had replied, searching in her pocket for a scrap of anything that would serve.

“Will this do?” he then queried, bringing forth a coil of gold wire which he had been commissioned to buy for some fanciful work of his mother.

“Finely,” she declared; “it is durable, it will give me a wide margin, it will be long in wearing out.”

“Nay, then, you must have something more fragile,” he had objected.

At that they both laughed, as he twisted a fragment of it on the little finger of her right hand.  “There it is to stay,” he asserted, “till your promise is redeemed.”  That was the last time he had seen her till to-day.

Now, sitting, thinking of the interview just passed, suddenly he remembered, as one often recalls the vision of something seemingly unnoticed at the time, that, upon her right hand, the little finger of the right hand, there was a delicate ring,—­a mere thread,—­in fact, a wire of gold; the very one himself had tied there two years ago.