he abyss of absolute
obscurity or impenetrable mystery, and create no stir--that no one
should deem it his or her business to seek or to find an answer to the
question, a reading of the riddle.

Not until two years after Edgar Poe had turned his back upon the closed
door of the Allan mansion, in Richmond, and stepped, as it seemed from
the edge of a world in which he was not wanted into the unknown, did
such an one arise. And that one was, as an especially good friend of
Edgar Poe's was most likely to be--a woman.

Between this woman:--Mrs. Maria Poe Clemm--a widow of middle age, and
The Dreamer, there existed the close blood-tie of aunt and nephew, for
she was the own sister of his father, David Poe.

More than that--there existed, though they had never seen each other, a
soul kinship rare between persons of the same blood, and which (for all
they had never seen each other) she, with the woman's unerring instinct
that sometimes seems akin to inspiration, divined. She too was something
of a dreamer, with an ear for the voices of Nature and a mind open to
the influences of its beauty, but with a goodly ballast of strong common
sense.

She was but a young girl when her handsome and idolized brother David
scandalized the family by marrying an actress and himself taking to the
stage. But she had seen the bewitching "Miss Arnold" at the theatre in
Baltimore--had, with fascinated eyes, followed her twinkling feet
through the mazy dance, had listened with charmed ears to her exquisite
voice, had sat spell-bound under her acting. To her childish mind, the
stage had become a fairy-land and Miss Arnold its presiding genius. That
brother David should love and marry her seemed like something out of a
fairy book. _She_ did not blame brother David; she secretly entirely
approved of him.

In her later years the death of the husband of her own youth who had
been romantically, passionately loved, had left her penniless but not
disillusioned; with her own living to get and a little daughter with a
face like a Luca Della Robbia chorister, and a voice that went with the
face, but who had the requirements of other flesh and blood children, to
be provided for. This child was the sunshine of the lonely widow's life,
yet she only in part filled the great mother's heart of her. Nature had
made her to be the mother of a son as well as a daughter, then
mockingly, it would seem, denied her.

But in her dreams she worshipped the son she had