tiptoe."

He dared not speak or give any sign of his presence, but he gazed and
gazed until to his entranced eyes it seemed that

"The pearly lustre of the moon went out:
The mossy banks and the meandering paths--
The happy flowers and the repining trees--
Were seen no more."

All was lost to his vision--

"Save only the divine light in those eyes--
Save but the soul in those uplifted eyes."

* * * * *

He continued to gaze until the moon disappeared behind a bank of cloud
and he watched the white-robed figure glide away like "a ghost amid the
entombing trees." Yet still (it seemed to him) the eyes remained. They
lighted his lonely footsteps home that night and he told himself that
they would light him henceforth, through the years.

Nearly a year had passed since that October night when the Star of Love
ushering in a new morning had prophesied to him of new hope--nearly a
year through which he had waited patiently, but not in vain. The time
had evidently come for the prophecy to be fulfilled and Fate had led him
to this town and the spot in this town where she that was to be (he was
convinced) the hope, the guide, the savior, of his "lonesome latter
years" awaited him.

Who was she?--

So spirit-like, so ethereal, she seemed, as robed in white and veiled in
silvery moon-beams she sat among the slumbering roses, and as she was
gathered into the shadows of the entombing trees, that she might almost
have been the "Lady Ligeia." Yet he knew that she was not. The "Lady
Ligeia" had been but the creation of his own brain. Very fair she had
been to his dreaming vision, very sweet her companionship had been to
his imagination--sufficient for all the needs of his being in his
youthful days when sorrow was but a beautiful sentiment, when "terror
was not fright, but a tremulous delight" but how was such an one as she
to bind up the broken heart of a man? It was the _human_ element in the
eyes of her that sat among the roses that enchained him.
Ethereal--spirit-like--as she was, the eyes upturned in sorrow were the
eyes of no spirit, but of a woman; from them looked a human soul with
the capacity and the experience to offer sympathy meet for human
needs--the needs even, of a broken-hearted man.

How dark the woe!--how sublime the hope!--how intense the pride!--how
daring the ambition!--how deep, how fathomless the capacity for
love!--that looked (as from a window)