ness and
patience,
Parted, and left me to spend the night in hysterical vigils,
Tending to Annie's supreme dismay, and postponing our journey
One day longer at least; for I went to bed in the morning,
Firmly rejecting the pity of friends, and the pleasures of travel,
Fixed in a dreadful purpose never to get any better.

Later, however, I rallied, when Fred, with a maddening prologue
Touching the cause of my sickness, including his fever at Jaffa,
Told me that some one was waiting; and could he see me a moment?
See me? Certainly not. Or,--yes. But why did he want to?
So, in the dishabille of a morning-gown and an arm-chair,
Languid, with eloquent wanness of eye and of cheek, I received
him--
Willing to touch and reproach, and half-melted myself by my pathos,
Which, with a reprobate joy, I wholly forgot the next instant,
When, with electric words, few, swift, and vivid, he brought me,
Through a brief tempest of tears, to this heaven of sunshine and
sweetness.

Yes, he had looked on a ghost--the phantom of love that was
perished!--
When, last night, he beheld the scene of which I have told you.
For to the woman he saw there, his troth had been solemnly plighted
Ere he went to the war. His return from the dead found her absent
In the belief of his death; and hither to Europe he followed,--
Followed to seek her, and keep, if she would, the promise between
them,
Or, were a haunting doubt confirmed, to break it and free her.
Then, at Naples we met, and the love that, before he was conscious,
Turned his life toward mine, laid torturing stress to the purpose
Whither it drove him forever, and whence forever it swerved him.
How could he tell me his love, with this terrible burden upon him?
How could he linger near me, and still withhold the avowal?
And what ruin were that, if the other were doubted unjustly,
And should prove fatally true! With shame, he confessed he had
faltered,
Clinging to guilty delays, and to hopes that were bitter with
treason,
Up to the eve of our parting. And then the last anguish was spared
him.
_Her_ love for him was dead. But the heart that leaped in his bosom
With a great, dumb throb of joy and wonder and doubting,
Still must yield to the spell of his silencing will till that
phantom
Proved an actual ghost by common-place tests of the daylight,
Suc