the years during which his passion for her had been cooling into a
staid friendship, his imagination had been recurring with constantly
increasing fondness and a dreamy passion to the memory of her
girlhood. And the cruelest part of it was that he so unconsciously and
unquestioningly assumed that she could not have identity enough with
that girlish ideal to make his frequent glowing references to it even
embarrassing. Generally, however, she heard and made no sign, but the
suddenness of his outburst just now had taken her off her guard.

He glanced up with some surprise at her exclamation, but was too much
interested in his subject to take much notice of it. "You know," he
said, "there are great differences in the distinctness with which we
can bring up our memories. Very well! The only question is, What is the
limit to that distinctness, or is there any? Since we know there are
such wide degrees in distinctness, the burden of proof rests on those
who would prove that those degrees stop short of any particular point.
Don't you see, then, that it might be possible to see them?" And to
enforce his meaning he laid his hand lightly on hers as it rested on the
window-seat.

She withdrew it instantly from the contact, and a slight flush tinged
her sallow cheeks. The only outward trace of her memory of their
youthful relations was the almost prudish chariness of her person by
which she indicated a sense of the line to be drawn between the former
lover and the present friend.

"Something in your look just now," he said, regarding her musingly, as
one who seeks to trace the lineaments of a dead face in a living one,
"reminds me of you as you used to sit in this very window as a girl,
and I stood just here, and we picked out stars together. There! now it's
gone;" and he turned away regretfully.

She looked at his averted face with a blank piteousness which revealed
all her secret. She would not have had him see it for worlds, but it was
a relief just for a moment to rest her features in the sad cast which
the muscles had grown tired in repressing. The autumn scent rose
stronger as the air grew damp, and he stood breathing it in, and
apparently feeling its influence like some Delphian afflatus.

"Is there anything, Mary,--is there anything so beautiful as that
light of eternity that rests on the figures of memory? Who that has once
felt it can care for the common daylight of the present any more, or
take pleasure in its prosa