we lived in constant preparation for a friend who might come in any evening (but who never did), it required some contrivance to keep our two candles of the same length, ready to be lighted, and to look as if we burnt two always.  The candles took it in turns; and, whatever we might be talking about or doing, Miss Matty’s eyes were habitually fixed upon the candle, ready to jump up and extinguish it and to light the other before they had become too uneven in length to be restored to equality in the course of the evening.

One night, I remember this candle economy particularly annoyed me.  I had been very much tired of my compulsory “blind man’s holiday,” especially as Miss Matty had fallen asleep, and I did not like to stir the fire and run the risk of awakening her; so I could not even sit on the rug, and scorch myself with sewing by firelight, according to my usual custom.  I fancied Miss Matty must be dreaming of her early life; for she spoke one or two words in her uneasy sleep bearing reference to persons who were dead long before.  When Martha brought in the lighted candle and tea, Miss Matty started into wakefulness, with a strange, bewildered look around, as if we were not the people she expected to see about her.  There was a little sad expression that shadowed her face as she recognised me; but immediately afterwards she tried to give me her usual smile.  All through tea-time her talk ran upon the days of her childhood and youth.  Perhaps this reminded her of the desirableness of looking over all the old family letters, and destroying such as ought not to be allowed to fall into the hands of strangers; for she had often spoken of the necessity of this task, but had always shrunk from it, with a timid dread of something painful.  To-night, however, she rose up after tea and went for them—­in the dark; for she piqued herself on the precise neatness of all her chamber arrangements, and used to look uneasily at me when I lighted a bed-candle to go to another room for anything.  When she returned there was a faint, pleasant smell of Tonquin beans in the room.  I had always noticed this scent about any of the things which had belonged to her mother; and many of the letters were addressed to her—­yellow bundles of love-letters, sixty or seventy years old.

Miss Matty undid the packet with a sigh; but she stifled it directly, as if it were hardly right to regret the flight of time, or of life either.  We agreed to look them over separately, each taking a different letter out of the same bundle and describing its contents to the other before destroying it.  I never knew what sad work the reading of old-letters was before that evening, though I could hardly tell why.  The letters were as happy as letters could be—­at least those early letters were.  There was in them a vivid and intense sense of the present time, which seemed so strong and full, as if it could never pass away, and as if the warm, living hearts that