she persisted. "Promise that you will come to us, and let us
sympathize with you, and try to help you. Perhaps we can't do
much, but it will surely be better than to try to bear such
feelings alone."

"I will come to you if you will let me," I said.

"Oh yes, yes, I beg you will," she said eagerly. "I would do
anything to help you that I could."

"All you need do is to be sorry for me, as you seem to be
now," I replied.

"It is understood, then," she said, smiling with wet eyes, "that
you are to come and tell me next time, and not run all over
Boston among strangers."

This assumption that we were not strangers seemed scarcely
strange, so near within these few minutes had my trouble and
her sympathetic tears brought us.

"I will promise, when you come to me," she added, with an
expression of charming archness, passing, as she continued, into
one of enthusiasm, "to seem as sorry for you as you wish, but you
must not for a moment suppose that I am really sorry for you at
all, or that I think you will long be sorry for yourself. I know, as
well as I know that the world now is heaven compared with
what it was in your day, that the only feeling you will have after
a little while will be one of thankfulness to God that your life in
that age was so strangely cut off, to be returned to you in this."