out, and he opened his trunk and began to re-read his collection of her letters, brooding over them fondly and striving to recall every detail of this past that had threatened to escape him. He opened the back of his watchcase, to find that her face was almost lost in the lustrous brown of the "unfixed" proof, as if it, too, were trying to fade away from him! And he sat gazing at it—in an attempt to stamp it for ever on the memory of his retina—until the light had quite obliterated it. Then he closed his eyes and smiled when he saw the after-image of her face, glancing aside in the pose of girlish shyness which he loved. That picture should never fade. He would summon it back every hour of the day, so that it might be glowing in the darkness when he gave himself up to the last sleepy thoughts of her at night.
She would return to him from Europe; he would be waiting, ready for her, in some position which should not be unworthy of her; their lives would join in a happy completion of the destiny foreshadowed by their past. Of that he made himself feel sure. For he was not merely an unconscious idealist, now; he was becoming a visionary. He not only believed in what was the unsupported tissue of his hope; he was making the hope itself and then believing in it.
It occurred to him—when he met Miss Morris on the stage again, and was greeted by her with an almost eager smile—that she had just such a confidence in him, and that she had intended to let him know as much in her parting from him on Sunday afternoon. He felt that he had shared his past with her; that
