n will quiver back about you for a
moment,--not as if to mock the expectation of the past, but softly,
touchingly, as if pleading to you to stay; and such a sadness, such a
tenderness may come to you, as one knows after reconciliation with a
friend misapprehended and unjustly judged.... But you will never more
see those streets,--except in dreams.

Through sleep only they will open again before you,--steeped in the
illusive vagueness of the first long-past day,--peopled only by friends
outreaching to you. Soundlessly you will tread those shadowy pavements
many times,--to knock in thought, perhaps, at doors which the dead will
open to you.... But with the passing of years all becomes dim--so dim
that even asleep you know 'tis only a ghost-city, with streets going to
nowhere. And finally whatever is left of it becomes confused and
blended with cloudy memories of other cities,--one endless bewilderment
of filmy architecture in which nothing is distinctly recognizable,
though the whole gives the sensation of having been seen before ...
ever so long ago.

* * * * *

Meantime, in the course of wanderings more or less aimless, there has
slowly grown upon you a suspicion of being haunted,--so frequently does
a certain hazy presence intrude itself upon the visual memory. This,
however, appears to gain rather than to lose in definiteness: with each
return its visibility seems to increase.... And the suspicion that you
may be haunted gradually develops into a certainty.

III

You are haunted,--whether your way lie through the brown gloom of
London winter, or the azure splendour of an equatorial day,--whether
your steps be tracked in snows, or in the burning black sand of a
tropic beach,--whether you rest beneath the swart shade of Northern
pines, or under spidery umbrages of palm:--you are haunted ever and
everywhere by a certain gentle presence. There is nothing fearsome in
this haunting ... the gentlest face ... the kindliest voice--oddly
familiar and distinct, though feeble as the hum of a bee....

But it tantalizes,--this haunting,--like those sudden surprises of
sensation _within_ us, though seemingly not _of_ us, which some dreamers
have sought to interpret as inherited remembrances,--recollections of
pre-existence.... Vainly you ask yourself:--"Whose voice?--whose face?"
It is neither young nor old, the Face: it has a vapoury indefinableness
that leaves it a riddle;--its dia