“My cousin Laura!” whispered Maurice to me, and went forward to meet her.  A very handsome woman, who might well have been in the thirties,—­one of those women so thoroughly constituted that they cannot help being handsome at every period of life.  I watched them both as they approached each other.  Both looked pale at first, but Maurice soon recovered his usual color, and Laura’s natural, rich bloom came back by degrees.  Their emotion at meeting was not to be wondered at, but there was no trace in it of the paralyzing influence on the great centres of life which had once acted upon its fated victim like the fabled head which turned the looker-on into a stone.

“Is the boy still awake?” said Maurice to Paolo, who, as they used to say of Pushee at the old Anchor Tavern, was everywhere at once on that gay and busy evening.

“What!  Mahser Maurice asleep an’ all this racket going on?  I hear him crowing like young cockerel when he fus’ smell daylight.”

“Tell the nurse to bring him down quietly to the little room that leads out of the library.”

The child was brought down in his night-clothes, wide awake, wondering apparently at the noise he heard, which he seemed to think was for his special amusement.

“See if he will go to that lady,” said his father.  Both of us held our breath as Laura stretched her arms towards little Maurice.

The child looked for an instant searchingly, but fearlessly, at her glowing cheeks, her bright eyes, her welcoming smile, and met her embrace as she clasped him to her bosom as if he had known her all his days.

The mortal antipathy had died out of the soul and the blood of Maurice Kirkwood at that supreme moment when he found himself snatched from the grasp of death and cradled in the arms of Euthymia.

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In closing the New Portfolio I remember that it began with a prefix which the reader may by this time have forgotten, namely, the First Opening.  It was perhaps presumptuous to thus imply the probability of a second opening.

I am reminded from time to time by the correspondents who ask a certain small favor of me that, as I can only expect to be with my surviving contemporaries a very little while longer, they would be much obliged if I would hurry up my answer before it is too late.  They are right, these delicious unknown friends of mine, in reminding me of a fact which I cannot gainsay and might suffer to pass from my recollection.  I thank them for recalling my attention to a truth which I shall be wiser, if not more hilarious, for remembering.

No, I had no right to say the First Opening.  How do I know that I shall have a chance to open it again?  How do I know that anybody will want it to be opened a second time?  How do I know that I shall feel like opening it?  It is safest neither to promise to open the New Portfolio once more, nor yet to pledge myself to keep it closed hereafter.  There are many papers potentially existent in it, some of which might interest a reader here and there.  The Records of the Pansophian Society contain a considerable number of essays, poems, stories, and hints capable of being expanded into presentable dimensions.  In the mean time I will say with Prospero, addressing my old readers, and my new ones, if such I have,