told him who she was and that they were birds of a feather
because if he had had in youth a strange adventure she had had about
the same time just such another. It was well known to her friends--an
incident she was constantly called on to describe. She was charming,
clever, pretty, unhappy; but it was none the less the thing to which she
had originally owed her reputation.

Being at the age of eighteen somewhere abroad with an aunt she had had
a vision of one of her parents at the moment of death. The parent was in
England, hundreds of miles away and so far as she knew neither dying nor
dead. It was by day, in the museum of some great foreign town. She had
passed alone, in advance of her companions, into a small room containing
some famous work of art and occupied at that moment by two other
persons. One of these was an old custodian; the second, before observing
him, she took for a stranger, a tourist. She was merely conscious that
he was bareheaded and seated on a bench. The instant her eyes rested on
him however she beheld to her amazement her father, who, as if he
had long waited for her, looked at her in singular distress, with
an impatience that was akin to reproach. She rushed to him with a
bewildered cry, "Papa, what _is_ it?" but this was followed by an
exhibition of still livelier feeling when on her movement he simply
vanished, leaving the custodian and her relations, who were at her
heels, to gather round her in dismay. These persons, the official, the
aunt, the cousins were therefore in a manner witnesses of the fact--the
fact at least of the impression made on her; and there was the further
testimony of a doctor who was attending one of the party and to whom
it was immediately afterwards communicated. He gave her a remedy for
hysterics but said to the aunt privately: "Wait and see if something
doesn't happen at home." Something _had_ happened--the poor father,
suddenly and violently seized, had died that morning. The aunt, the
mother's sister, received before the day was out a telegram announcing
the event and requesting her to prepare her niece for it. Her niece was
already prepared, and the girl's sense of this visitation remained of
course indelible. We had all as her friends had it conveyed to us and
had conveyed it creepily to each other. Twelve years had elapsed and
as a woman who had made an unhappy marriage and lived apart from her
husband she had become interesting from other sources; but since the