surd and incredible, that
he couldn't believe them himself.

Pretty soon he observed that she was becoming a little conscious in
her air, and giving a slightly sentimental turn to the conversation.
It was not for some time that he saw her drift, so utterly without
connection in his mind were Ida and this comfortable matron before
him, and when he did, a smile at the exquisite absurdity of the thing
barely twitched the corners of his mouth, and ended in a sad, puzzled
stare that rather put the other out of countenance.

But the children had now for some time been whimpering for supper and
home, and at length Frau Stein rose, and, with an urgent request that
Randall should call on her and see her husband, bade him a cordial
adieu. He stood there watching her out of sight with an unconscious
smile of the most refined and subtle cynicism. Then he sat down and
stared vacantly at the close-cropped grass on the opposite side of the
path. By what handle should he lay hold of his thoughts?

That woman could not retroact and touch the memory of Ida. That dear
vision remained intact. He drew forth his locket and opening it gazed
passionately at the fair girlish face, now so hopelessly passed away.
By that blessed picture he could hold her and defy the woman.
Remembering that fat, jolly, comfortable matron, he should not at
least ever again have to reproach himself with his cruel treatment of
Ida. And yet why not? What had the woman to do with her? She had
suffered as much as if the woman had not forgotten it all. His
reckoning was with Ida--was with her. Where should he find her? In
what limbo could he imagine her? Ah, that was the wildering cruelty
of it. She was not this woman, nor was she dead in any conceivable
natural way so that her girlish spirit might have remained eternally
fixed. She was nothing. She was nowhere. She only existed in this
locket and her only soul was in his heart, far more surely than in
this woman who had forgotten her.

Death was a hopeful, cheerful state compared to that nameless
nothingness that was her portion. For had she been dead he could still
have loved her soul; but now she had none. The soul that once she had,
and if she had then died, might have kept, had been forfeited by
living on and had passed to this woman, and would from her pass on
further till finally fixed and vested in the decrepitude of age by
death. So then it was death and not life that secured the soul, and
his sweet Ida ha