In an instant, by one of those inexplicable connections of the brain or soul, he found himself living over an experience of his college youth.

He had been spending the day in Boston with a dear friend, some score of years his senior; a man of the rarest culture, and of a most sweet and gentle nature withal; and when evening came they had drifted naturally to the theatre,—­the fool’s paradise it may be sometimes, but to them on that occasion a real paradise.

He remembered well the play.  It was Scott’s Bride of Lammermoor.  He had never read it, but, before the curtain rose, his friend had unfolded the story in so kind and skilful a manner as to have imbued him as fully with the spirit of the tale as though he had studied the book.

What he chiefly recalled in the play was the scene in which Ravenswood comes back to Emily long after they had been plighted,—­long after he had supposed her faithless,—­long after he had been tossed on a sea of troubles, touching the seeming decay in her affections.  Just as she is about to be enveloped in the toils which were spread for her,—­just as she is about to surrender herself to the hated nuptials, and submit to the embrace of one whom she loathed more than she dreaded death,—­Ravenswood, the man whom Heaven had made for her, presents himself.

What followed was quiet, yet intensely dramatic.  Ravenswood, wrought to the verge of despair, bursts upon the scene at the critical moment, detaches Emily from her party, and leads her slowly forward.  He is unutterably sad.  He questions her very tenderly; asks her whether she is not enforced; whether she is taking this step of her own free will and accord; whether she has indeed dismissed the dear, old fond love for him from her heart forever?  He must hear it from her own lips.  When timidly and feebly informed that such is indeed the case, he requests her to return a certain memento,—­a silver trinket which had been given her as the symbol of his love on the occasion of their betrothal.  Raising her hand to her throat she essays to draw it from her bosom.  Her fingers rest upon the chain which binds it to her neck, but the o’erfraught heart is still,—­the troubled, but unconscious head droops upon his shoulder,—­he lifts the chain from its resting-place, and withdraws the token from her heart.

Supporting her with one hand and holding this badge of a lost love with the other, he says, looking down upon her with a face of anguish, and in a voice of despair, “And she could wear it thus!”

As this scene rose and lived before him, Surrey exclaimed, “Surely that must have been the perfection of art, to have produced an effect so lasting and profound,—­’and she could wear it thus!’—­ah,” he said, as in response to some unexpressed thought, “but Emily loved Ravenswood.  Why—?” Evidently he was endeavoring to answer a question that baffled him.

CHAPTER XII