INGATH'S VOOER. 347 



Miss Ingath resolutely pulled out a drawer and 

 began to inspect its contents. The first thing that met 

 her eye was a ballad written by her mother when she 

 was a song-loving, song-lilting lassie. Ingath covered 

 it up quickly with a bundle of receipts, and went on 

 with her task. But from a second drawer tumbled a 

 wisp of simmering hair, bright as when it was shorn 

 from some bonnie brow ; and beside that lay a bundle 

 of well-worn love letters ! 



With fingers that shivered as if they were groping 

 among the ashes of the dead, Ingath gathered up the 

 hair and the letters and laid them aside to be burned, 

 wishing with all her heart that some one, ages ago, had 

 been wise enough to do so. No one had ever asked or 

 received a lock of her hair. She had never been foolish 

 enough to write a love letter ; so Ingath could deceive 

 herself by an assumption of contempt for such tokens 

 of a foolish sentiment. She could even smile and 

 mutter " silly, how silly ! " as she turned to her task 

 again. Alas ! wrapped in a parchment deed she found 

 a rosette of satin belonging to a baby's christening cap, 

 and from between the folds of an old worm-eaten will 

 dropped a blue scarf tied in a sailor's knot. 



The baby had lived to be an old man, a testy, ugly, 

 old man. The sailor, whose ribbon had been so pre- 

 served, had been drowned, and his lass had married 

 some one else, and had survived to see her grand- 

 children's children; and yet — under Miss Halcro's 

 thin hands lay those touching memorials. Not those 

 only. A battered powder flask, a carved tobacco pipe, 



