widow; I could hear that she was in affliction; but I was far too diffident to invent any little courteous way of expressing my sympathy. In about half an hour, she put her veil to one side, and asked me, in a low, sweet, pathetic voice, if I had any objection to drawing down the blind, as her veil smothered her, and she had wept so much that her eyes could not bear the strong light of the afternoon sun. I drew down the blind—with such haste as to pinch my fingers cruelly between the sash and the sill. [134] "Oh, I am so sorry!" said she. "It's of no consequence," I stammered, making a Toots of myself. "Oh, but it is! and in my service too! Let me be your surgeon, sir," and she took from her traveling-bag a small bottle of cologne, with which she drenched a delicate film of black-bor[135]dered handkerchief, and then wound the same around my aching fingers. "You are pale," she continued, slightly pressing my hand before releasing it—"ah, how sorry I am!" [135] "I am pale because I have been ill recently," I responded, conscious that all my becoming pallor was changing to turkey-red. "Ill?—oh, how sad! What a world of trouble we live in! Ill?—and so young—so hand——. Excuse me, I meant not to flatter you, but I have seen so much sorrow myself. I am only twenty-two, and I've been a wid—wid—wid—ow over a year." She wiped away a tear with handkerchief No. 2, and smiled sadly in my face. "Sorrow has aged her," I thought, for, although the blind was down, she looked to me nearer thirty than twenty-two. Still, she was pretty, with dark eyes that looked into yours in a wonderfully confiding way—melting, liquid, deep eyes, that even a man who is perfectly self-possessed can not see to the bottom of soon enough for his own good. As for me, those eyes confused while they pleased me. The widow never noticed my embarrassment; but, the ice once broken, talked on and on. She gave me, in soft, sweet, broken accents, her history—how she had been her mother's only pet, and had married a rich Chicago broker, who had died in less than two years, leaving her alone—all alone—with plenty[136] of money, plenty of jewelry, a fine house, but alas, "no one to love her, none to caress," as the song says, and the world a desert. [136] "But I can still
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