ence or the monotony of a commonplace existence that we quickest
flee? A man with passions like mine must love; and if that love comes
girt with flame and mysterious death, he still must embrace it, and rise
and fall as the destinies will.

"But I talk riddles. I have not yet told you of her; and yet speak of
fire and death. I will try to be more coherent, if only to show that the
years have brought me some mastery over myself. One day--it was a fall
day and beautiful as limpid sunshine and a world of yellowing woods
could make it--I went to Miss Dudleigh's house to apologize for my
friend, who had wished to improve the gorgeous sunshine elsewhere.

"I had by this time lost all fear of her, as well as of her rich and
spacious surroundings, and passed through the hospitable door and along
the wide halls to the especial room in which we were wont to find her,
with that freedom engendered by an intimacy as cordial as it was
sincere. It was the room where first I had seen her, the room with the
wide latticed window at the back, and the spinet beneath it, and the old
carven chair of oak in which her white-clad form had always looked so
ethereal; and I entered it smiling, expecting to see her delicate figure
rise from the window, and advance toward me with that look of surprise
and possible disappointment which the absence of Urquhart would be apt
to arouse in this too loving nature. But the room was empty and the
spinet closed, and I was about turning to find a servant, when I felt an
influence stealing over me so subtile and so peculiar that I stood
petrified and enthralled, hardly knowing if it were music that held me
spell-bound or some unknown and subduing perfume, that, filling my
senses, worked upon my brain, and made me feel like a man transported at
a breath from the land of reality into a land of dreams.

"So potent the spell, so inexplicable its action, that minutes may have
elapsed before I wrenched myself free from its power and looked to see
what it was that so moved me. When I did, I found myself at a loss to
explain it. Whether it was music or perfume, or just the emanation from
an intense personality, I have never determined. I only know that when I
turned, I saw standing before me, in an attitude of waiting, a woman of
such marvelous attractions, and yet of an order of beauty so bizarre and
out of keeping with the times and the place in which she stood, that I
forgot to question everything but my own sanity