ression of this library. I have gone over
it very carefully since, and amused myself with noting its
omissions--quite as significant in such cases as the actual contents.
No classics but the usual school and college text-books; no recent
fiction; almost no American literature except the most reliable of the
historians; none of the essayists or belle-lettrists, except Carlyle,
Macaulay, and such like heavy artillery; nothing whatever of a
religious nature but a small, worn Bible thick with dust, on the top
shelf among the school-books. And there was not in the whole library
one page or line or word to indicate that its owner was conversant
with or interested in Italian or Italy.

O builder of that sand-hued cottage, owner of that manly room of
books, how many hours have I devoted to patient study of you! How many
nights have I hunted you down, searched you out, compelled you to
reveal yourself to me--and how strangely have I succeeded! It has been
a labour of love, and I have sometimes felt I know your mind almost as
my own.

In the outside further corner of the room a narrow, steep flight of
steps led to the second story and lent a queer little foreign air to
the whole. Ascending, I found myself in a small room with one
door--its only entrance--and one window. For a moment I had a curious
sense of the English barracks and seemed to be in the major's
sleeping-room again. A low cot-bed with a narrow rug beside, a pine
washing-stand and a chest of drawers, a straight chair and small
bed-table with a reflecting candle and match box upon it, and a flat
tin bath furnished this room, which was, like all the others,
speckless. A small shaving-mirror was attached at convenient height
near the window; razor and strop hung beside it. All this I took in at
a glance, without turning, but when I did turn and confronted the
entrance wall, I caught my breath. For there on the space directly
opposite the bed hung what, for a moment, I took to be a portrait of
Margarita.

I moved closer and saw that it was a wonderfully perfect etching of a
head by Henner--a first impression, beyond a doubt. It was a girl's
head, half life size, almost in profile, white against the dark rain
of her hair, which covered her shoulders and bust and blackened all
the rest of the picture. The haunting melancholy, the youth, the
purity of that face have become so associated with Margarita and her
home and that part of my life that I can never separate them,