moon; but you mustn't forget that many are thus meant for each other
who never meet, not to speak of marrying. It is such contradictions
between the purposes and performance of the Creator that make
life--life; you'll never see her again, so make your mind easy--"

At that moment the gig was on the point of turning a corner into a dark
pine-wood; but just ere it disappeared,--was it fancy?--I seemed to
have caught the flash of a momentarily fluttering handkerchief. "Won't
I? you fool!" I exclaimed, savagely smiting reason on the cheek, as I
sprang up wildly to wave mine; but the road was already blank.

At this a sort of panic possessed me, and like a boy I raced down the
road after her. To lose her like this, at the very moment that she had
been revealed to me. It was more than I could bear.

Past the dreary lake, through the little pine-wood I ran, and then I
was brought to a halt, panting, by cross-roads and a finger-post. An
involuntary memory of Nicolete sang to me as I read the quaint names of
the villages to one of which the Vision was certainly wending. Yes! I
was bound on one more journey to the moon, but alas! there was no
heavenly being by my side to point the way. Oh, agony, which was the
road she had taken?

It never occurred to me till the following day that I might have been
able to track her by the wheel-marks of the gig on the dusty summer
road. Instead I desperately resorted to the time-honoured expedient of
setting up a stick and going in the direction of its fall. Like most
ancient guide-posts, it led me quite wrong, down into a pig's-trough of
a hamlet whither I felt sure she couldn't have been bound. Then I ran
back in a frenzy, and tried the other road,--as if it could be any use,
with at least three quarters of an hour gone since I had lost sight of
her. Of course I had no luck; and finally, hot and worn out with
absurd excitement, I threw myself down in a meadow and called myself an
ass,--which I undoubtedly was.

For of all the fancies that had obsessed my moonstruck brain, this was
surely the maddest. Suppose I had overtaken the girl, what could I
have said to her? And, suppose she had listened to me, how did I know
she was the girl I imagined her to be? But this was sheer reason again,
and has no place in a fantastic romance. So I hasten to add that the
mood was one of brief duration, and that no cold-water arguments were
able to quench the fire which those eyes had set aflam