nd personal
thing that a man can leave behind him. When we look at it we see what he
saw, hour after hour, day after day, and we see it through his mood
and impression, coloured by his emotion, tinged with his personality.
Surely, if the spirits of the dead are not extinguished, but only veiled
and hidden, and if it were possible by any means that their presence
could flash for a moment through the veil, it would be most natural that
they should come back again to hover around the work into which their
experience and passion had been woven. Here, if anywhere, they would
"Revisit the pale glimpses of the moon." Here, if anywhere, we might
catch fleeting sight, as in a glass darkly, of the visions that passed
before them while they worked.

This much of my train of reasoning along the edge of the dark, I
remember sharply. But after this, all was confused and misty. The shore
of consciousness receded. I floated out again on the ocean of forgotten
dreams. When I woke, it was with a quick start, as if my ship had been
made fast, silently and suddenly, at the wharf of reality, and the bell
rang for me to step ashore.

But the vision of the white blot remained clear and distinct. And the
question that it had brought to me, the chain of thoughts that had
linked themselves to it, lingered through the morning, and made me feel
sure that there was an untold secret in Falconer's life and that the
clew to it must be sought in the history of his last picture.

But how to trace the connection? Every one who had known Falconer,
however slightly, was out of town. There was no clew to follow. Even the
name "Larmone" gave me no help; for I could not find it on any map
of Long Island. It was probably the fanciful title of some old
country-place, familiar only to the people who had lived there.

But the very remoteness of the problem, its lack of contact with the
practical world, fascinated me. It was like something that had drifted
away in the fog, on a sea of unknown and fluctuating currents. The only
possible way to find it was to commit yourself to the same wandering
tides and drift after it, trusting to a propitious fortune that you
might be carried in the same direction; and after a long, blind,
unhurrying chase, one day you might feel a faint touch, a jar, a thrill
along the side of your boat, and, peering through the fog, lay your hand
at last, without surprise, upon the very object of your quest.

III

As it happened,