ry,--this end of the crumbling earth,--this beginning of the
eternal sea. There! don't think that idea my own, or that I thought of
it then. No,--I read it all afterwards, and that's why I'm telling you
this."

She could not help smiling at his now attentive face, and went on: "Some
days afterwards I got hold of a newspaper four or six months old, and
there was a description of all that I thought I had seen and felt,--only
far more beautiful and touching, as you shall see, for I cut it out
of the paper and have kept it. It seemed to me that it must be some
personal experience,--as if the writer had followed some dear friend
there,--although it was with the unostentation and indefiniteness of
true and delicate feeling. It impressed me so much that I went back
there twice or thrice, and always seemed to move to the rhythm of that
beautiful funeral march--and I am afraid, being a woman, that I wandered
around among the graves as though I could find out who it was that had
been sung so sweetly, and if it were man or woman. I've got it here,"
she said, taking a dainty ivory porte-monnaie from her pocket and
picking out with two slim finger-tips a folded slip of newspaper; "and
I thought that maybe you might recognize the style of the writer, and
perhaps know something of his history. For I believe he has one. There!
that is only a part of the article, of course, but it is the part that
interested me. Just read from there," she pointed, leaning partly over
his shoulder so that her soft breath stirred his hair, "to the end; it
isn't long."

In the film that seemed to come across his eyes, suddenly the print
appeared blurred and indistinct. But he knew that she had put into his
hand something he had written after the death of his wife; something
spontaneous and impulsive, when her loss still filled his days and
nights and almost unconsciously swayed his pen. He remembered that his
eyes had been as dim when he wrote it--and now--handed to him by this
smiling, well-to-do woman, he was as shocked at first as if he had
suddenly found her reading his private letters. This was followed by a
sudden sense of shame that he had ever thus publicly bared his feelings,
and then by the illogical but irresistible conviction that it was false
and stupid. The few phrases she had pointed out appeared as cheap and
hollow rhetoric amid the surroundings of their social tete-a-tete over
the luncheon-table. There was small danger that this heady win