promised herself, when her "fairy prince" came back, and woke up the
sleeping cupid from his bed of sighs, the world would be happier and
brighter, and full of pleasure unalloyed forevermore. So in the lonely
meanwhile, little words of kind regard, and little deeds of gallant
courtesy, seemed to her as only forerunners or harbingers of what was
coming to her out of the "to be" from the lips and hands of her absent
lover.

Such a way of viewing things naturally influenced this girl's character
and brought her back to that distracted existence, that contact with
practical life had almost annihilated. Her old meditative propensities
stole upon her again, it was nothing new now to see her with folded
hands and dreamy eyes that looked vacantly into the space before them.

A wonderful change was also coming over Henry Rayne; he who had spent a
good fifty years of his life in active service for society, now began to
feel, like countless others who had gone before him, that after all, the
most he could claim as the wages of honest fame and honor, were the
cushioned depths of an invalid chair, the first grade, to the narrow bed
where he would sleep his eternal sleep.

The old man was growing daily weaker and more childish, having never
known any of those influences through life, which become identical with
the very existence of those who have tasted them in wedded life, Henry
Rayne found himself in the sunset of his years with scarcely a tie to
bind him to the world for which he had done so much. There was only
Honor, who stood out in relief from the monotonous experience of his
life, and invited him to tarry a little longer on the border-line of
time; every moment that passed into eternity now seemed to bring this
girl nearer and nearer to his heart, for it was necessary, that at least