_how_ many--but not many.

* * * * *

Clad all in white, upon a violet bank
I saw thee half reclining; while the moon
Fell on the upturned faces of the roses,
And on thine own, upturned,--alas in sorrow!
Was it not Fate, that, on this July midnight--
Was it not Fate (whose name is also Sorrow)
That bade me pause before that garden-gate
To breathe the incense of those slumbering roses?
No footstep stirred: the hated world all slept,
Save only thee and me. (Oh, Heaven!--oh, God!
How my heart beats in coupling those two words!)
Save only thee and me!" ...

The paper trembled in the hands--tiny and spirit-like--of Helen Whitman.
Her soul answered emphatically,

"It _is_ Fate!"

So he had been there in the flesh--near her--in the shadows of that
mystic night! The presence was no creation of an overwrought
imagination. It was Fate.

Tremulously she penned her answer to his appeal, but was it Fate again,
which caused the letter to miscarry? It reached him finally, in
Richmond--_Richmond_, of all places!--whither he had gone to deliver to
audiences of his old friends, his lecture upon "The Poetic Principle,"
in the interest of the establishment of his magazine, _The Stylus_. What
could have been more fitting than that the gracious words of "Helen of a
thousand dreams" should come to him in Richmond?

* * * * *

Not many days later and he was under her own roof in Providence.

He waited in the dimness of her curtained drawing-room, ear strained for
the first sound of her footstep. Noiselessly as a sunbeam or a shadow
she entered the room, her gauzy white draperies floating about her
slight figure as she came, while his great eyes drank in with reverent
joy each detail of her ethereal loveliness--her face, the same he had
seen in the garden, pale as a pearl and as softly radiant, and framed in
clustering dark ringlets which escaped in profusion from the confinement
of a lacy widow's cap--the tremulous mouth--the eyes, mysterious and
unearthly, from which the soul looked out.

For one moment she paused in the doorway, her hand pressed upon her
wildly beating heart--then, with hesitating step advanced to meet him.
Her words of greeting were few, and so low and faltering as to be quite
unintelligible, but the tones of her voice fell on his ear like
strangely familiar music.

The man spoke no word. As her