he is loved, except by love's sacrifice. I should
like to share with you a human document, as they say to-day, which is in
itself a drama with a denouement. But I must ask you not to use it, for
the secret is not my own." With the assurance of my discretion he went on:
"I had a friend, a companion of my own age, who, when he was twenty, had
loved a young girl. He was poor, she was rich. Her family separated them.
The girl married some one else and almost immediately afterward she died.
My friend lived. Some day you will know for yourself that it is almost as
true to say that one recovers from all things as that there is nothing
which does not leave its scar. I had been the confidant of his serious
passion, and I became the confidant of the various affairs that followed
that first ineffaceable disappointment. He felt, he inspired, other loves.
He tasted other joys. He endured other sorrows, and yet when we were alone
and when we touched upon those confidences that come from the heart's
depths, the girl who was the ideal of his twentieth year reappeared in his
words. How many times he has said to me, 'In others I have always looked
for her and as I have never found her, I have never truly loved any one
but her.'"

"And had she loved him?" I interrupted.

"He did not think so," replied Fauchery. "At least she had never told him
so. Well, you must now imagine my friend at my age or almost there. You
must picture him growing gray, tired of life and convinced that he had at
last discovered the secret of peace. At this time he met, while visiting
some relatives in a country house, a mere girl of twenty, who was the
image, the haunting image of her whom he had hoped to marry thirty years
before. It was one of those strange resemblances which extend from the
color of the eyes to the 'timbre' of the voice, from the smile to the
thought, from the gestures to the finest feelings of the heart. I could
not, in a few disjointed phrases describe to you the strange emotions of
my friend. It would take pages and pages to make you understand the
tenderness, both present and at the same time retrospective, for the dead
through the living; the hypnotic condition of the soul which does not know
where dreams and memories end and present feeling begins; the daily
commingling of the most unreal thing in the world, the phantom of a lost
love, with the freshest, the most actual, the most irresistibly naive and
spontaneous thing in it, a young gir