I burst out laughing as the idea crossed my mind. Since
the innocently happy days of my boyhood I had known no more of love than
the insect that now crept over my hand as it lay on the grass. My money,
to be sure, would buy me a wife; but would my money make her dear to
me? dear as Mary had once been, in the golden time when my portrait was
first painted?

Mary! Was she still living? Was she married? Should I know her again if
I saw her? Absurd! I had not seen her since she was ten years old: she
was now a woman, as I was a man. Would she know _me_ if we met? The
portrait, still pursuing me, answered the question: "Look at what you
were once; think of what you are now!"

I rose and walked backward and forward, and tried to turn the current of
my thoughts in some new direction.

It was not to be done. After a banishment of years, Mary had got back
again into my mind. I sat down once more on the river bank. The sun was
sinking fast. Black shadows hovered under the arches of the old stone
bridge. The red light had faded from the swift-flowing water, and had
left it overspread with one monotonous hue of steely gray. The
first stars looked down peacefully from the cloudless sky. The first
shiverings of the night breeze were audible among the trees, and visible
here and there in the shallow places of the stream. And still, the
darker it grew, the more persistently my portrait led me back to the
past, the more vividly the long-lost image of the child Mary showed
itself to me in my thoughts.

Was this the prelude of her coming back to me in dreams; in her
perfected womanhood, in the young prime of her life?

It might be so.

I was no longer unworthy of her, as I had once been. The effect produced
on me by the sight of my portrait was in itself due to moral and mental
changes in me for the better, which had been steadily proceeding since
the time when my wound had laid me helpless among strangers in a strange
land. Sickness, which has made itself teacher and friend to many a man,
had made itself teacher and friend to me. I looked back with horror at
the vices of my youth; at the fruitless after-days when I had impiously
doubted all that is most noble, all that is most consoling in human
life. Consecrated by sorrow, purified by repentance, was it vain in me
to hope that her spirit a nd my spirit might yet be united again? Who
could tell?

I rose once more. It could serve no good purpose to linger until night
by the bank