time and
place. The composition was finished; it stood up before me like a flower
raised over-night. Eight hours had passed since I sat down to the work,
after dinner. I was tired. As I began to draw into a pile the sheets of
paper I had covered with notes, weariness gripped me like a hand.

Eight hours? If I had shoveled in a ditch twice that long I could have
felt no more exhausted. Yielding to drained fatigue of mind and body, I
dropped my head upon the arms I folded upon the table. My hot, strained
eyes closed with relief, my stiff fingers relaxed. Rest and content
flowed over me; my work was done, and good.

Rest passed into sleep, no doubt.

The sleep could not have been long, for not many hours remained before
dawn. When I started awake and lifted my head, I found the room in
darkness. A perfume was in the air, and the sense of a presence scarcely
more tangible than the perfume. Even in the first dazed moment, I knew
my lady had come again.

"Do not rise!" her murmuring voice cautioned me. "Unless you wish me to
go?"

"No!"

"I am here because I promised to come. It was not wise of you to ask
that of me."

"Then I prefer folly to wisdom," I answered, steadying myself to full
wakefulness. "Or, rather, I am not sure that you can decide for me which
is which!"

"Why? After all, why? Just--curiosity?"

"You, who speak so learnedly of magic and sorcery," I retorted, smiling
under cover of the darkness, "have you never heard of the white magic
conjured by a tress of hair, a perfume ball, and a voice sweeter than
the perfume? An image of wax does not melt before a witch's fire so
easily as a man before these things."

"My hair pleased you?" she questioned naively.

"Or so easily as a woman melts before admiration!" I supplemented. "I am
delighted to prove you human, mystic lady. Please me? Could anyone fail
to be pleased with that most magnificent braid? But how can either you
or I forgive the cruelty that took it from its owner? Why did you cut it
off?"

"So little of it! And I did not know you, then."

"Little? That braid?"

"It reached below my knee, now it is but little less," she answered with
indifference. "We all have such hair."

I gasped. My imagination painted the picture of all that shining
richness enwrapping a slim young body. It was fantastic beyond belief to
sit there at my desk, beneath my fingers the tools of sober, workaday
life, and stare into the dark room that held the reality