aited for me for years and years; and it would break his heart not to
find me here when he comes." She pointed with a contemptuous gesture
to the magic vision of hill and vale sloping away to the translucent
mountains. "He wouldn't give a fig for all that," she said, "if he
didn't find me here."

"But consider," warned the Spirit, "that you are now choosing for
eternity. It is a solemn moment."

"Choosing!" she said, with a half-sad smile. "Do you still keep up here
that old fiction about choosing? I should have thought that YOU knew
better than that. How can I help myself? He will expect to find me here
when he comes, and he would never believe you if you told him that I had
gone away with someone else--never, never."

"So be it," said the Spirit. "Here, as on earth, each one must decide
for himself."

She turned to her kindred soul and looked at him gently, almost
wistfully. "I am sorry," she said. "I should have liked to talk with
you again; but you will understand, I know, and I dare say you will find
someone else a great deal cleverer--"

And without pausing to hear his answer she waved him a swift farewell
and turned back toward the threshold.

"Will my husband come soon?" she asked the Spirit of Life.

"That you are not destined to know," the Spirit replied.

"No matter," she said, cheerfully; "I have all eternity to wait in."

And still seated alone on the threshold, she listens for the creaking of
his boots.

The End of The Fulness of Life

A VENETIAN NIGHT'S ENTERTAINMENT

December 1903

This is the story that, in the dining-room of the old Beacon Street
house (now the Aldebaran Club), Judge Anthony Bracknell, of the famous
East India firm of Bracknell & Saulsbee, when the ladies had withdrawn
to the oval parlour (and Maria's harp was throwing its gauzy web of
sound across the Common), used to relate to his grandsons, about the
year that Buonaparte marched upon Moscow.

I

"Him Venice!" said the Lascar with the big earrings; and Tony Bracknell,
leaning on the high gunwale of his father's East Indiaman, the Hepzibah
B., saw far off, across the morning sea, a faint vision of towers and
domes dissolved in golden air.

It was a rare February day of the year 1760, and a young Tony, newly
of age, and bound on the grand tour aboard the crack merchantman of old
Bracknell's fleet, felt his heart leap up as the distant city trembled
into shape. VENICE! The name, since childhood