"

Her hand was at the heavy knocker as she spoke. In a moment the door
slowly opened, just as it had done that night before in Washington. My
companion passed before me swiftly. As she entered I saw standing at the
opening the same brown and wrinkled old dame who had served that night
before in Washington!

For an instant the light dazzled my eyes, but, determined now to see
this adventure through, I stepped within. Then, indeed, I found it
difficult to stifle the exclamation of surprise which came to my lips.
Believe it or not, as you like, we _were_ again in Washington!

I say that I was confronted by the identical arrangement, the identical
objects of furnishing, which had marked the luxurious boudoir of Helena
von Ritz in Washington! The tables were the same, the chairs, the
mirrors, the consoles. On the mantel stood the same girandoles with
glittering crystals. The pictures upon the walls, so far as I could
remember their themes, did not deviate in any particular of detail or
arrangement. The oval-backed chairs were duplicates of those I had seen
that other night at midnight. Beyond these same amber satin curtains
stood the tall bed with its canopy, as I could see; and here at the
right was the same low Napoleon bed with its rolled ends. The figures of
the carpets were the same, their deep-piled richness, soft under foot,
the same. The flowered cups of the sconces were identical with those I
had seen before. To my eye, even as it grew more studious, there
appeared no divergence, no difference, between these apartments and
those I had so singularly visited--and yet under circumstances so
strangely akin to these--in the capital of my own country!

"You are good enough to admire my modest place," said a laughing voice
at my shoulder. Then indeed I waked and looked about me, and saw that
this, stranger than any mirage of the brain, was but a fact and must
later be explained by the laborious processes of the feeble reason.

I turned to her then, pulling myself together as best I could. Yes, she
too was the same, although in this case costumed somewhat differently.
The wide ball gown of satin was gone, and in its place was a less
pretentious robing of some darker silk. I remembered distinctly that the
flowers upon the white satin gown I first had seen were pink roses. Here
were flowers of the crocus, cunningly woven into the web of the gown
itself. The slippers which I now saw peeping out as she passed were not
of