learness of the
portrait.

The strong, sweet dream-wave still enclouding his brain, Laurence stands
gazing upon these, and his heart is as though enwrapped with a dull
tightening pain.

"Sorceress! and does the spell still enthral me here?" he murmurs,
"here, and after all this time. Have you forgotten me? Perhaps. No, that
cannot be and yet--Time! Time dulls everything. Time brings changes.
Perhaps even the memory of me is waning, is becoming dulled."

But the softening love-light in the pictured eyes seems to contradict
the conjecture. Here, in the hot brassy glare of the far wilderness, in
the haunts of bloodshed and wrong, that sweet, pure image seems clothed
as with a divinity to his hungry gaze.

"Others can see you in life; others can hear the music of your voice, my
beloved; others can look into the light of those eyes, can melt to the
radiance of your smile, while I--only the image is mine, the tiny oblong
of hard inanimate cardboard," he murmurs, in a tone that is half
weariful, half passionate. "And now for the words!"

A slip of folded paper occupies the side of the little tin box. This he
extracts and unfolds with a touch that is almost reverent, and, as his
eyes wander over the writing, his every faculty of soul and mind and
being is concentrated in rapt love upon each word. For not every day
will he suffer his eyes to rest upon them, lest too great familiarity
with them should dull them with a mechanical nature when seen so often.
They are kept for rare occasions, and now, his waking thoughts sweet
with the influence of the recent dream, he reckons just such an
occasion.

The history of the box, the portraits, the letter, was a strange one.
After that last parting, as Laurence was wending his way in the
darkness, he became aware that his breast pocket contained something
which was not there before. He drew it forth. It was small, flat, hard,
oblong. By the light of successive vestas he proceeded to investigate,
and there, in the flickering glow, Lilith's sweet eyes gazed out at him
from the cardboard, daintily framed within the work of her fingers, even
as here in the burning glare of the equatorial sun; and there, too,
within the box, lay a folded slip of paper covered with her
handwriting--her last words to him, drawing out, perpetuating the echo
of her last spoken ones. With a thrill of love and pain, he had stood
there in the darkness until his last vesta had burned out, and then the
letter wa