really preferred a sharp-featured, thin-haired, close-fisted gentleman of
forty to a conceivable hero of half that age, dowered with every grace and
beauty, not to mention Miss Tremount's seventy thousand pounds. Is she to
be blamed if she sighed with a passing regret at that hero's mysterious
disappearance? Yes, he had disappeared, more mysteriously and more
irrevocably than old Sir Charles seventy years ago. Where in the heavens
or the earth or under the earth, indeed, was he? Did he still exist
anywhere? Might she dream of ever meeting him again--that hero?...! Bah!
what nonsense!

"Pretty!" repeated Archie, who, in the subsidence of his other faculties,
had retained an appreciation of color.

"Poor boy--poor thing!" said Kate; "you lost a great deal when you lost
your wits; between being a groomsman and a bridegroom there is a very wide
difference. And you don't even care--perhaps that's your greatest loss of
all--ha, ha! Come, Archie, it's time for little fellows like you to be
asleep."

"Kate--" began Archie; and paused.

"What?"

"Do you love anybody?"

She met his look of dull yet earnest inquiry with a contemptuous smile at
first, but afterward her smile died away and she answered soberly:

"I did once."