Providence.
It was a warm night and the window of his room was open--letting in a
flood of light from the full moon. He leaned from the window which
looked upon a plot of flowers whose many odors rising, enveloped him in
incense sweet as the incense from the censers of the angels when the
spirit of his Virginia was near. But it was not of Virginia that the
fragrance told him tonight. Something about the blended odors, combined
with the sensuous warmth of the night and the light of the moon,
transported him suddenly, magically, back through the years to his
boyhood and to the little room in the Allan cottage on Clay Street,
hanging, like this room, over a space of flowers--the night following
the day when he had first seen Rob Stanard's mother.

Back, back into the long dead past he wandered! The broken and jaded
Edgar Poe was dreaming again the dream of the fresh, enthusiastic boy,
Edgar Poe.

How every incident of that day and night stood out in his memory! He
could feel again the wonder that he felt when he saw the beautiful
"Helen" standing against the arbor-vitae in the garden; could see her
graceful approach to meet and greet him--the lonely orphan boy--could
hear her gracious words in praise of his mother while she held his hand
in both her own. As he lived it all over again, with the silver
moonlight enfolding him and the breath of the flowers filling his
nostrils, a clock somewhere in the house struck the night's noon hour.
He started--even so it had been that other night in the long past. He
half believed that if he should go forth into this night as he had gone
into that he should see once more the lady of his dream, with the lamp
in her hand, framed in the ivy-wreathed window, and seeing, worship as
he had worshipped then.

Scarce knowing what he did, he arose and hurrying down the stair was in
the street. The streets were strange to him but there was a pleasant
sense of adventure in wandering through them--he knew not whither--and
the sweet airs of the flowers were everywhere.

Suddenly he stopped. While all the town slept there was one beside
himself, who kept vigil. Clad all in white, she half reclined upon a
violet bank in an old garden where the moon fell on the upturned faces
of a thousand roses and on her own, "upturned,--alas, in sorrow!"

Faint with the beauty and the poetry of the scene he leaned upon the
gate of the

"enchanted garden
Where no wind dared to stir unless on