nel. An album was brought down
from a dusty shelf, and then I had to admit that my old friend had
become positively corpulent. But it is not Jack I want to speak about.
I turned listlessly over the pages of the album, stopping suddenly at
the face of a beautiful girl. You are not asleep, are you?

"I am not naturally sentimental, as you know, and even now I am not
prepared to admit that I fell in love with this face. It was not, I
think, that kind of attraction. Possibly I should have passed the
photograph by had it not suggested old times to me--old times with a
veil over them, for I could not identify the face. That I had at some
period of my life known the original I felt certain, but I tapped my
memory in vain. The lady was a lovely blonde, with a profusion of fair
hair, and delicate features that were Roman when they were not Greek.
To describe a beautiful woman is altogether beyond me. No doubt this
face had faults. I fancy, for instance, that there was little character
in the chin, and that the eyes were 'melting' rather than expressive.
It was a vignette, the hands being clasped rather fancifully at the back
of the head. My fingers drummed on the album as I sat there pondering;
but when or where I had met the original I could not decide. The colonel
could give me no information. The album was Jack's, he said, and
probably had not been opened for years. The photograph, too, was an
old one; he was sure it had been in the house long before his son's
marriage, so that (and here the hard-hearted old gentleman chuckled) it
could no longer be like the original. As he seemed inclined to become
witty at my expense, I closed the album, and soon afterward I went away.
I say, wake up!

[Illustration]

"From that evening the face haunted me. I do not mean that it possessed
me to the exclusion of everything else, but at odd moments it would
rise before me, and then I fell into a revery. You must have noticed
my thoughtfulness of late. Often I have laid down my paper at the club
and tried to think back to the original. She was probably better known
to Jack Goring than to myself. All I was sure of was that she had been
known to both of us. Jack and I had first met at Cambridge. I thought
over the ladies I had known there, especially those who had been friends
of Goring's. Jack had never been a 'lady's man' precisely; but, as he
used to say, comparing himself with me, 'he had a heart.' The annals of
our Cambridge days were se