nd. Half the world stretched on either side between me and the spot
I tried to forget, and which floated forever, like a vision, between
me and reality.

I had remained longer than usual in this city, for the simple reason
that it was the hot season, and while the natives could stand it by
day, visitors, unused to the heat, were forced to sleep by day and
wander abroad by night, a condition that made it possible for me to
feel my fellowmen about me nearly the entire twenty-four hours.

It was night.

I was sitting alone on the balcony of my room, looking down on to the
crowded bridges of the city where throngs were passing, and filled my
eyes and mind.

It was the very hour at which I had last seen her. There was no clock
in sight--I always guarded against that in selecting my room. I had
long ceased to carry a watch.

Yet I knew the hour.

I had been sitting there for hours watching the crowd. I had not been
drinking. I had long ago abandoned that. No stimulant could blur the
fixed regret, no narcotic numb my full sense of it. Sleep, whether I
rose to it, or fell to it--only brought me dreams of her. Desperate
nourishing of a great misery, in a nature that resented it, even while
cherishing it, had made me a conscious monomaniac. Fate had thwarted
me, and distorted me. I had become jealous and morbid, bitterly
reviling my hurt, but violently preventing its healing.

There was a moon--just as there had been that night, only now it fell
on a many bridged river across which were ghostly cypress trees,
rising along the hillside to a strangely outlined church behind ruined
fortifications. I was wondering, against my will, at what hour that
moon rose over the distant New England village, which came before me
in a vision that wiped out the wooded heights of reality.

Suddenly all the pain dropped away from me.

I drew a long breath in amazement.

Where was the weight under which I had staggered, mentally, all these
years? Whence came the peace that had so suddenly descended upon me?
In an instant it had passed, and I could only remember my bitter mood
of ten years as if it had been a dream that I had lived so long
unconsoled by that great healer, Time.

As the torturing jealousy dropped from me, a gentle sadness took its
place. In an instant my mind was made up. I would go back.

This idea, which had never come to me in ten years, seemed now
perfectly natural. I would return at once to that far off village
whe