nywhere in the
universe, did she any more exist, that knowledge was quite without effect
upon the devotion which she had inspired. The matter indeed, presented
itself in a very simple way to his mind. "If I had never seen her
picture," he said one day to Miss Ludington, "I should never have known
that my love was dead, and I should have gone seeking her through all the
world, and wondering what was the reason I could not find her."

Miss Ludington was over sixty years of age and Paul was twenty-two when
he finished his course at college. She had naturally supposed that, on
going out into the world, mixing with young men and meeting young women,
he would outgrow his romantic fancy concerning Ida; but the event was
very different. As year after year he returned home to spend his
vacations, it was evident that his visionary passion was strengthening
rather than losing its hold upon him.

But the strangest thing of all was the very peculiar manner in which,
during the last vacation preceding his graduation, he began to allude to
Ida in his conversations with Miss Ludington. It was, indeed, so peculiar
that when, after his return to college, she recalled the impression left
upon her mind, she was constrained to think that she had, somehow,
totally misunderstood him; for he had certainly seemed to talk as if Ida,
instead of being that most utterly, pathetically dead of all dead
things--the past self of a living person--were possibly not dead at all:
as if, in fact she might have a spiritual existence, like that ascribed
to the souls of those other dead whose bodies are laid in the grave.

Decidedly, she must have misunderstood him.

Some months later, on one of the last days of June, he graduated. Miss
Ludington would have attended the graduation exercises but for the fact
that her long seclusion from society made the idea of going away from
home and mingling with strangers intolerable. She had expected him home
the morning after his graduation. When, however, she came downstairs,
expecting to greet him at the breakfast-table, she found instead a letter
from him, which, to her further astonishment, consisted of several
closely written sheets. What could have possessed him to write her this
laborious letter on the very day of his return?

The letter began by telling her that he had accepted an invitation from a
class-mate, and should not be home for a couple of days. "But this is
only an excuse," he went on; "the true reas