size and not a vestige of color in
her cheek or lips: she looked like a corpse still engaged in the
mechanical act of gazing on the scene of agony which had preceded
its death. Suddenly she sprang to her feet and threw out her hands.
"Stop!" she cried; "stop!"

"What is it?" he demanded, rising to his feet in amazement; he had
been watching her with more or less surprise for some time. "I am
afraid I have frightened you and made you nervous. I had better have
kept my confidence to myself."

"No, no," she cried, throwing back her head and clasping her hands
about it; "it is not that I am frightened--only--it was so strange!
While you were talking it seemed--oh! I cannot describe it!--as if you
were telling me something which I knew as well as yourself. When
you spoke it seemed to me that I knew and could put into words the
wonderful verse-music which was battling upward to reach your brain.
They were, they were--I know them so well. I have known them always;
but I cannot--I cannot catch their meaning!" Suddenly she stepped
backward, dropped her hands, and colored painfully. "It is all purest
nonsense, of course," she said, in her ordinary tone and manner,
except for its painful embarrasment. "It is only your strong,
picturesque way of telling it which presented it as vividly to my mind
as if it were an experience of my own. I never so much as dreamed of
it before you began to speak."

Dartmouth did not answer her for a moment. His own mind was in
something of a tumult. In telling the story he had felt, not a
recurrence of its conditions, but a certain sense of their influence;
and the girl's manner and words were extraordinary. It could hardly
be possible, even in cold blood, to understand their meaning. She
was indisputably not acting. What she had said was very strange and
unconventional, but from whatever source the words had sprung, they
had not been uttered with the intention premeditated or spontaneous
of making an impression upon him. They carried conviction of their
sincerity with them, and Dartmouth was sensible that they produced
a somewhat uncanny but strangely responsive effect upon himself.
But what did it mean? That in some occult way she had been granted
a glimpse into the depths of his nature was unthinkable. He was not
averse to indulging a belief in affinity; and that this girl was his
was not a disagreeable idea; but his belief by no means embraced a
second, to the effect that the soul of one's ant