“As I was turning away in despair, a voice called to me.  I turned and beheld a woman beckoning to me from an upper window.  This person I recognized immediately as having once seen, in your company, and joyfully retraced my steps, in the hope of hearing something that would give me a clue to your whereabouts.

“‘I’m Mrs. Bailey,’ said the woman, coming down and standing in the doorway, ’and I kalkilate you’re after some news of that young girl that used to go out governessing.’

“I replied eagerly in the affirmative.

“‘Well, there ain’t much to tell,’ she said, slowly.  ’The mother took sick and died, and the girl herself just managed to live through a dreadful long illness.  She was hardly able to sit up when she went away.  I hear she’s gone travellin’ for her health.  If that’s so, somebody must have furnished the means, and it wasn’t that widow, who was the only friend they had in the whole wide city.  More like it was a certain handsome young gentleman I could tell you about.

“‘I’ll tell you what it is, Mr. Vaughn,’ said the woman, eyeing me closely, ’you are wasting valuable time that might be better employed than in following up an adventuress.  Take the advice of a disinterested friend, and let this Miss Graystone alone.’

“Of course, I then and there indignantly resented this officiousness; but she reiterated her caution in my unwilling ears, and, finally, when I was about to leave her, took from her pocket a small slip of paper.

“‘Read that, Mr. Vaughn,’ she said.

“I did so.  It was a marriage notice of a Mr. Legrange to a Miss C. Elizabeth Graystone.”

“A distant relative,” said Clemence.  “We were not intimately acquainted, and this is the first intimation that I have gained of Cousin Lottie’s marriage.”

“Being somewhat confused at the time,” continued Mr. Vaughn, “I supposed, of course, that this was the lady I sought, and that farther search was fruitless.  There seemed now no more to be done.  Of my feelings of disappointment and regret, I will speak hereafter.

“Having now nothing to occupy my attention, I mingled more in society, at my sister-in-law’s earnest solicitation, though I cared little for the strangers whom I met.  More than a year passed in this aimless way.

“One evening, however, at a brilliant soiree, I met an elderly lady, with whom I got quite well acquainted in the course of an agreeable conversation.  She was a woman of keen intellect, and it seemed to me rather a masculine mind.  I was astonished to find such an one amid this idle crowd of gay worldlings, and I spoke at some length of the pleasure I had enjoyed.  She told me, then, that we were not such entire strangers as I seemed to suppose, but that we had a mutual friend, a young lady who was then absent from the city.

“This, of course, piqued my curiosity, and, upon asking an explanation, she told me all she knew of the one whom I had so long been vainly seeking.