o Brooklyn for immortelles, and had spent
the day in festooning them about Ida's picture, so that now the sweet
girlish face seemed smiling upon them out of a veritable bower of the
white flowers of immortality.

In the days that followed, Miss Ludington seemed a changed woman, such
blitheness did the new faith she had found bring into her life. The
conviction that the past was deathless, and her bright girlhood immortal,
took all the melancholy out of retrospection. Nay, more than that, it
turned retrospection into anticipation. She no longer viewed her
youth-time through the pensive haze of memory, but the rosy mist of hope.
She should see it again, for was it not safe with God? Her pains to guard
the memory of the beautiful past, to preserve it from the second death of
forgetfulness, were now all needless; she could trust it with God, to be
restored to her in his eternal present, its lustre undimmed, and no trait
missing.

The laying aside of her mourning garb was but one indication of the
change that had come over her.

The whole household, from scullion to coachman, caught the inspiration of
her brighter mood. The servants laughed aloud about the house. The
children of the gardener, ever before banished to other parts of the
grounds, played unrebuked in the sacred street of the silent village.

As for Paul, since the revelation had come to him that the lady of his
love was no mere dream of a life for ever vanished, but was herself alive
for evermore, and that he should one day meet her, his love had assumed a
colour and a reality it had never possessed before. To him this meant all
it would have meant to the lover of a material maiden, to be admitted to
her immediate society.

The sense of her presence in the village imparted to the very air a fine
quality of intoxication. The place was her shrine, and he lived in it as
in a sanctuary.

It was not as if he should have to wait many years, till death, before he
should see her. As soon as he gave place to the later self which was to
succeed him, he should be with her. Already his boyish self had no doubt
greeted her, and she had taken in her arms the baby Paul who had held his
little arms out to her picture twenty years before.

To be in love with the spirit of a girl, however beautiful she might have
been when on earth, would doubtless seem to most young men a very
chimerical sort of passion; but Paul, on the other hand, looked upon the
species of attraction