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Rh upper shelf, but when she again stretched out her hands for the basin of milk, she let her arms drop and said, "No, perhaps it is too high for me, after all."

A faint smile passed over his face as he took the basin and carried it carefully out; she accompanied him and opened the doors for him. Every time he passed her she looked closely at him. His collar, his necktie, his coat—everything was different from her father's, and he carried with him a peculiar perfume which she did not know.

When they came to the garden door, he stopped for an instant, and looked up with a melancholy smile: "I must take a moment to recover my expression of gaiety, so that no one out there may notice anything."

Then he passed out upon the steps with a joking speech to the company at the table, and she heard their laughing answers; but she herself remained behind in the garden-room.

Poor young man! how sorry she was for him! and how strange that she of all people should be the only one in whom he confided. What secret sorrow could it be that depressed him? Perhaps he, too, had lost his mother. Or could it be some thing still more terrible? How glad she would be if only she could help him.

When Rebecca presently came out he was once more the blithest of them all. Only once in a while, when he looked at her, his eyes seemed again to