ine cases out of ten it's a volume
of Jeffrey Aspern."

I watched her well as I pronounced that name but I saw nothing
wonderful. Why should I indeed--was not Jeffrey Aspern the property of
the human race?

"Oh, we read him--we HAVE read him," she quietly replied.

"He is my poet of poets--I know him almost by heart."

For an instant Miss Tita hesitated; then her sociability was too much
for her.

"Oh, by heart--that's nothing!" she murmured, smiling. "My aunt used to
know him--to know him"--she paused an instant and I wondered what she
was going to say--"to know him as a visitor."

"As a visitor?" I repeated, staring.

"He used to call on her and take her out."

I continued to stare. "My dear lady, he died a hundred years ago!"

"Well," she said mirthfully, "my aunt is a hundred and fifty."

"Mercy on us!" I exclaimed; "why didn't you tell me before? I should
like so to ask her about him."

"She wouldn't care for that--she wouldn't tell you," Miss Tita replied.

"I don't care what she cares for! She MUST tell me--it's not a chance to
be lost."

"Oh, you should have come twenty years ago: then she still talked about
him."

"And what did she say?" I asked eagerly.

"I don't know--that he liked her immensely."

"And she--didn't she like him?"

"She said he was a god." Miss Tita gave me this information flatly,
without expression; her tone might have made it a piece of trivial
gossip. But it stirred me deeply as she dropped the words into the
summer night; it seemed such a direct testimony.

"Fancy, fancy!" I murmured. And then, "Tell me this, please--has she got
a portrait of him? They are distressingly rare."

"A portrait? I don't know," said Miss Tita; and now there was
discomfiture in her face. "Well, good night!" she added; and she turned
into the house.

I accompanied her into the wide, dusky, stone-paved passage which on the
ground floor corresponded with our grand sala. It opened at one end into
the garden, at the other upon the canal, and was lighted now only by the
small lamp that was always left for me to take up as I went to bed. An
extinguished candle which Miss Tita apparently had brought down with her
stood on the same table with it. "Good night, good night!" I replied,
keeping beside her as she went to get her light. "Surely you would know,
shouldn't you, if she had one?"

"If she had what?" the poor lady asked, looking at me queerly over the
flame of her candle.

"A portrait o