the way to reunion with my kindred spirit in the time to
come. For the first two or three months of our travels I was haunted
by dreams of the woman who had so resolutely left me. Seeing her in my
sleep, always graceful, always charming, always modestly tender toward
me, I waited in the ardent hope of again beholding the apparition of her
in my waking hours--of again being summoned to meet her at a given place
and time. My anticipations were not fulfilled; no apparition showed
itself. The dreams themselves grew less frequent and less vivid and then
ceased altogether. Was this a sign that the days of her adversity
were at an end? Having no further need of help, had she no further
remembrance of the man who had tried to help her? Were we never to meet
again?

I said to myself: "I am unworthy of the name of man if I don't forget
her now!" She still kept her place in my memory, say what I might.

I saw all the wonders of Nature and Art which foreign countries could
show me. I lived in the dazzling light of the best society that Paris,
Rome, Vienna could assemble. I passed hours on hours in the company
of the most accomplished and most beautiful women whom Europe could
produce--and still that solitary figure at Saint Anthony's Well, those
grand gray eyes that had rested on me so sadly at parting, held their
place in my memory, stamped their image on my heart.

Whether I resisted my infatuation, or whether I submitted to it, I still
longed for her. I did all I could to conceal the state of my mind from
my mother. But her loving eyes discovered the secret: she saw that I
suffered, and suffered with me. More than once she said: "George, the
good end is not to be gained by traveling; let us go home." More than
once I answered, with the bitter and obstinate resolution of despair:
"No. Let us try more new people and more new scenes." It was only when
I found her health and strength beginning to fail under the stress of
continual traveling that I consented to abandon the hopeless search
after oblivion, and to turn homeward at last.

I prevailed on my mother to wait and rest at my house in London before
she returned to her favorite abode at the country-seat in Perthshire.
It is needless to say that I remained in town with her. My mother now
represented the one interest that held me nobly and endearingly to life.
Politics, literature, agriculture--the customary pursuits of a man in my
position--had none of them the slightest attr