he took out and opened a neatly folded package, containing a long
tress of jet black hair. Shudderingly he wound it around his fingers,
laid it over the back of his hand, held it up to the light, and then
with a hard, dark look upon his face, threw it, too upon the grate,
saying aloud, "Thus perisheth every memento of the past, and I am free
again--free as air!"

He walked to the window, and pressing his burning forehead against the
cool, damp pane, looked out upon the night. He could not see through
the darkness, but had it been day, his eye would have rested on broad
acres all his own; for Ralph Browning was a wealthy man, and the house
in which he lived was his by right of inheritance from a bachelor
uncle for whom he had been named, and who, two years before our story
opens, had died, leaving to his nephew the grand old place, called
_Riverside_, from its nearness to the river. It was a most beautiful
spot; and when its new master first took possession of it, the maids
and matrons of Granby, who had mourned for the elder Browning as
people mourn for a good man, felt themselves somewhat consoled from
the fact that his successor was young and handsome, and would
doubtless prove an invaluable acquisition to their fireside circles,
and furnish a theme for gossip, without which no village can well
exist. But in the first of their expectations they were mistaken, for
Mr. Browning shunned rather than sought society, and spent the most of
his leisure hours in the seclusion of his library, where, as Mrs.
Peters, his housekeeper, said, he did nothing but mope over books and
walk the floor. "He was melancholy," she said; "there was something
workin' on his mind, and what it was she didn't know more'n the dead--
though she knew as well as she wanted to, that he had been crossed in
love, for what else would make so many of his hairs gray, and he not
yet twenty-five!"