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 That was on an evening when he knew perfectly well that Mattie and Hattie had gone to a dance, and he made no pretence of having come to call on any one but their mother. Mrs. Ben had enjoyed his visit very much. She had found him so talkative and easy—not nearly so stiff in his manners as he used to be—that she felt justified in assuring Hattie that if he had ever suffered from any disappointment he must have got over it entirely.

But Hattie knew better. That faith in the immortality of love, which most young girls cherish, had asserted itself in her heart. Emerson Swain, who had given up the game with a half-pitiful, wholly-contemptuous smile at his own expense, would have been surprised and touched if he had suspected anything of the almost passionate loyalty with which his scornful little divinity believed in him.

Meanwhile the last of May had come, and Decoration Day was close at hand. Decoration Day, which meant so much when first it was celebrated, soon after the close of the war. It seemed that year as though the very flowers knew why they bloomed, and pressed forward to meet the day. In the fields about Dunbridge the daisies and buttercups ran riot, and all the brooksides were blue with long-stemmed violets. Brilliant columbines grew about the rocks, and fragile wood anemones and hardy cornel blossoms hid side by side in the woods. All the young people of the town had