he stars, and gaze unafraid into the blue
abysses beyond?

Ah! Love, it seemed far away indeed from the stars, the place where we
met, and only by the light of love's eyes might we have found each
other--as only by the light of love's eyes... But enough, my Heart,
the world waits to hear our story,--the world once so unloving to you,
the world with a heart so hard and anon so soft for love. When the
story is ended, my love, when the story is ended--

CHAPTER II

GRACE O' GOD

It was a hard winter's night four years ago, lovely and merciless; and
towards midnight I walked home from a theatre to my rooms in St.
James's Street. The Venusberg of Piccadilly looked white as a nun with
snow and moonlight, but the melancholy music of pleasure, and the sad
daughters of joy, seemed not to heed the cold. For another hour death
and pleasure would dance there beneath the electric lights.

Through the strange women clustering at the corners I took my
way,--women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, and
Hittites,--and I thought, as I looked into their poor painted
faces,--faces but half human, vampirish faces, faces already waxen with
the look of the grave,--I thought, as I often did, of the poor little
girl whom De Quincey loved, the good-hearted little 'peripatetic' as he
called her, who had succoured him during those nights, when, as a young
man, he wandered homeless about these very streets,--that good, kind
little Ann whom De Quincey had loved, then so strangely lost, and for
whose face he looked into women's faces as long as he lived. Often
have I stood at the corner of Titchfield Street, and thought how De
Quincey had stood there night after night waiting for her to come, but
all in vain, and how from the abyss of oblivion into which some cruel
chance had swept her, not one cry from her ever reached him again.

I thought, too, as I often did, what if the face I seek should be here
among these poor outcasts,--golden face hidden behind a mask of shame,
true heart still beating true even amidst this infernal world!

Thus musing, I had walked my way out of the throng, and only a figure
here and there in the shadows of doorways waited and waited in the cold.

It was something about one of these waiting figures,--some movement,
some chance posture,--that presently surprised my attention and
awakened a sudden sense of half recognition. She stood well in the
shadow, seeming rather to shrink from than to c