Page:The Black Cat v06no11 (1901-08).djvu/55

Rh mention the subject, which, I can assure you, sir, was seldom indeed. As well as I can piece these bits together it was something like this:

"Many years ago her family lived in the South and there she met a young physician, who became greatly attached to her. It seems an epidemic of smallpox broke out, and the doctor risked his professional reputation in getting the Damons away and through the lines of the 'shot-gun quarantine' which had been established. He remained there and eventually came down with the disease, which left him with horrible scars. Upon his recovery, he wrote Miss Damon telling her of this and she replied in a letter filled with expressions of deepest sympathy; scars of the skin, she wrote, could not mar the soul, and bade him come to her, but, somehow, the letter miscarried and he never received it. He waited for the answer through several trying months and then wrote her saying he should go abroad to bury himself somewhere in Europe. She was right, he said, to consider him as one dead. He sent the mirror at the same time. There wasn't much to tell, and I fear I have hardly done it justice,” the lawyer concluded.

Caverley, with great patience, put the mirror together again, and that evening he took it to the lady for whom he had bought it, and told her the stoiy. And she, being a sympathetic little woman, wept.