ray to a stranger in this unconscionable
manner. No, he was not a stranger! She knew his thoughts and feelings
as well as she knew her own; they were, in fact, the self-same thoughts
and feelings as hers, which her husband distinctly lacked; perhaps
luckily for himself; considering that he had to provide for family
expenses.

'He's nearer my real self, he's more intimate with the real me than Will
is, after all, even though I've never seen him,' she said.

She laid his book and picture on the table at the bedside, and when she
was reclining on the pillow she re-read those of Robert Trewe's verses
which she had marked from time to time as most touching and true. Putting
these aside, she set up the photograph on its edge upon the coverlet, and
contemplated it as she lay. Then she scanned again by the light of the
candle the half-obliterated pencillings on the wall-paper beside her
head. There they were--phrases, couplets, bouts-rimes, beginnings and
middles of lines, ideas in the rough, like Shelley's scraps, and the
least of them so intense, so sweet, so palpitating, that it seemed as if
his very breath, warm and loving, fanned her cheeks from those walls,
walls that had surrounded his head times and times as they surrounded her
own now. He must often have put up his hand so--with the pencil in it.
Yes, the writing was sideways, as it would be if executed by one who
extended his arm thus.

These inscribed shapes of the poet's world,

'Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality,'

were, no doubt, the thoughts and spirit-strivings which had come to him
in the dead of night, when he could let himself go and have no fear of
the frost of criticism. No doubt they had often been written up hastily
by the light of the moon, the rays of the lamp, in the blue-grey dawn, in
full daylight perhaps never. And now her hair was dragging where his arm
had lain when he secured the fugitive fancies; she was sleeping on a
poet's lips, immersed in the very essence of him, permeated by his spirit
as by an ether.

While she was dreaming the minutes away thus, a footstep came upon the
stairs, and in a moment she heard her husband's heavy step on the landing
immediately without.

'Ell, where are you?'

What possessed her she could not have described, but, with an instinctive
objection to let her husband know what she had been doing, she slipped
the photograph under the pillow just as he flung open the door,