from those eyes upturned in
sorrow, in the moonlight while all the town slept!

Who was she?--this lady of sorrows. And by what sweet name was she known
to the citizens of this old town?--Surely Fate that had brought her to
the bank of violets beneath the moon--Fate that had led him to her
garden gate, would in Fate's own time reveal!

* * * * *

As Helen Whitman flitted as noiselessly as the ghost she seemed to be up
the dark stairway to her chamber, and without closing the casement that
admitted the moonlight and the garden's odors, lay down upon her
canopied bed, she trembled. What was it that she had been aware of in
the garden?--that presence--that consciousness of communion between her
spirit and his upon whom all her thoughts had dwelt of late? Herself a
poet, from her earliest knowledge of the work of Edgar Poe she had
seemed to feel a kinship between her mind and his such as she had known
in regard to no other. She had followed his career step by step, and out
of the many sorrows of her own life had been born deep sympathy for him.
Since his last, greatest blow, she had more than ever mourned with him
in spirit, for she too was widowed--she too had sat upon the Rock of
Desolation and knew the Silence and the Solitude.

She and The Dreamer had at least one mental trait in common--a tendency
toward spiritualism--a more than half belief in the communion of the
spirits of the dead with those of the living and of those of the living
with each other.

What had led her into the moonlit garden when all the world slept?

She knew not. She only knew that she had felt an impelling influence--a
call to her spirit--to come out among the slumbering roses. She had not
questioned nor sought to define it. She had heard it, and she had
obeyed. And then the presence!--

She had never seen Edgar Poe, yet she felt that he had been there in the
spirit, if not in the flesh--she had felt his eyes upon her eyes and she
had half expected him to step from the shadows around her and to say,

"I, upon whom your thoughts have dwelt--I, who am the comrade and the
complement of your inner life--I, whose spirit called to you ere you
came into the garden--I am here."

* * * * *

It was almost immediately upon The Dreamer's return to Fordham, and when
he was still under the spell of the night at Providence, that the
identity of the lady of the garden was revealed to him, i