of the
dressing-table was littered with a few linen and silk toilet covers; and
on the mantel-shelf was a sheaf of photographs. He walked towards them
mechanically, glanced at them abstractedly, and then stopped suddenly
with a beating heart. Before him was the picture of his past, the
photograph of the one woman who had filled his life!

He cast a hurried glance around the room as if he half expected to see
the original start up before him, and then eagerly seized it and hurried
with it to the light. Yes! yes! It was SHE,--she as she had lived in his
actual memory; she as she had lived in his dream. He saw her sweet eyes,
but the frightened, innocent trouble had passed from them; there was
the sensitive elegance of her graceful figure in evening dress; but the
figure was fuller and maturer. Could he be mistaken by some wonderful
resemblance acting upon his too willing brain? He turned the photograph
over. No; there on the other side, written in her own childlike hand,
endeared and familiar to his recollection, was her own name, and the
date! It was surely she!

How did it come there? Did the Van Loos know her? It was taken in
Venice; there was the address of the photographers. The Van Loos were
foreigners, he remembered; they had traveled; perhaps had met her there
in 1858: that was the date in her handwriting; that was the date on the
photographer's address--1858. Suddenly he laid the photograph down, took
with trembling fingers a letter-case from his pocket, opened it, and
laid his last letter to her, indorsed with the cruel announcement of her
death, before him on the table. He passed his hand across his forehead
and opened the letter. It was dated 1856! The photograph must have been
taken two years AFTER her alleged death!

He examined it again eagerly, fixedly, tremblingly. A wild impulse to
summon Barker or Stacy on the spot was restrained with difficulty and
only when he remembered that they could not help him. Then he began to
oscillate between a joy and a new fear, which now, for the first time,
began to dawn upon him. If the news of her death had been a fiendish
trick of her relations, why had SHE never sought him? It was not ill
health, restraint, nor fear; there was nothing but happiness and
the strength of youth and beauty in that face and figure. HE had not
disappeared from the world; he was known of men; more, his memorable
good fortune must have reached her ears. Had he wasted all these
miserable yea