Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/255

Rh quality of dogged pride, saved me from succumbing to the sense that life had nothing worth living for. How I cursed my folly in having exposed myself to the suffering! "The child I should have forgotten; the woman I never, never can forget," I groaned to myself daily. I destroyed Ally's picture. I destroyed every note I had of hers except the little bit of paper on which were written in the big childish letters: "If you were here I would kiss you." That I could not destroy. When I bade her good-by she gave me one of the tourmalines from her cross, and this I laughingly promised to wear always as a charm.

"Have a care, Will. There 's more in those stones than you think," said Jim.

Indeed there was. I was distinctly conscious many times of an electric effect produced on my nerves by the stone. I unconsciously acquired the habit of holding it in my hand while I was reading, or whenever I sank into a reverie. Sometimes for days it would not give me any sensation whatever. Then suddenly,—whether from my own physical condition or from the state of the atmosphere, or from some subtle bond between it and its magnetized fellow hanging at Ally's belt, I cannot say,—it would give me sharp shock after shock, would seem, as Ally had said when she was a child, to "purr" in my hand, and would make me "see things " as it used to make her see them. Often, at such times, I would see the interior of the