ealest_ thing! Its hair is darker and longer and curlier than it used
to be. Perhaps this baby will always stay with me, and I shall see it
grow into boyhood, then, at last, into manhood. It's wonderful to have
this dream-baby! Tell me, have you ever had one? I know you are alone
in life, for you have said so. But the more alone in life one was, the
dearer a dream-baby might be."

After that letter, which pierced Denin's heart and then poured balm
into the wound, the child-Barbara who haunted the Mirador had changed
for him, except in name; or rather another child-Barbara had come, not
a child of ten or twelve, but a baby thing with smoke-blue eyes and
little satin rings of ruddy hair. The elder Barbara did not go away,
but loved the baby as he did, helping him teach it how to walk, and
talk, and think.

He wrote to Lady Denin after that letter of hers: "Yes, I too have a
dream-child, but mine is a little girl. I hardly know how I got on
without her before she came."

"Thank Heaven for memory!" he said to himself now, as he took his last
look at the tunnel of greenery starred with passion-flowers. "After
all, does it so much matter whether we had a beloved thing one minute
ago, or ten years ago, if it lives always in our hearts? Each tick of
the watch turns the present into the past. But in our hearts there is
no past."

So he bade good-by to the pergola, and the garden he had made out of a
tangled wilderness. Then he turned towards the house; for in the house
he had to take leave of the portrait.

CHAPTER XVII

"I'll get out here, please!" said a woman in black, stopping the
automobile which had brought her from the railway station within sight
of the Fay place. She was tall and slender, and apparently young, but
her mourning veil was so thick that it lay like drifting coal-smoke
between her face and the curious stare of the chauffeur.

"It's a quarter of a mile to the gate yet. And I shan't charge any more
to take you right to it," he explained.

"I know--thank you!" his passenger said. "But I want to walk the rest
of the way."

She had a pretty way of speaking, though rather a foreign sort of
accent, he thought. Perhaps it was English. Her luggage had been left
at the station, so she was free to do as she pleased, if it amused her
to spoil her shoes with the white dust of the road. She paid the price
agreed upon, and a dollar over, which the chauffeur acknowledged with a
"Thank you, miss!" As he t