es
upon her, passed through his mind, but he dismissed it. And then
occurred a strange incident, which startled even his cool, American
sanity.

It was a beautiful moonlight night, and he was returning to a bedroom
at the hotel which he temporarily occupied during the painting of
his house. It was quite late, he having spent the evening with a San
Francisco friend after a business conference which assured him of the
remarkable prosperity of Excelsior. It was therefore with some human
exaltation that he looked around the sleeping settlement which had
sprung up under the magic wand of their good fortune. The full moon had
idealized their youthful designs with something of their own youthful
coloring, graciously softening the garish freshness of paint and
plaster, hiding with discreet obscurity the disrupted banks and broken
woods at the beginning and end of their broad avenues, paving the rough
river terrace with tessellated shadows, and even touching the rapid
stream which was the source of their wealth with a Pactolean glitter.

The windows of the hotel before him, darkened within, flashed in the
moonbeams like the casements of Aladdin's palace. Mingled with his
ambition, to-night, were some softer fancies, rarely indulged by him in
his forecast of the future of Excelsior--a dream of some fair partner
in his life, after this task was accomplished, yet always of some one
moving in a larger world than his youth had known. Rousing the half
sleeping porter, he found, however, only the spectral gold-seeker in
the vestibule,--the rays of his solitary candle falling upon her
divining-rod with a quaint persistency that seemed to point to the
stairs he was ascending. When he reached the first landing the rising
wind through an open window put out his light, but, although the
staircase was in darkness, he could see the long corridor above
illuminated by the moonlight throughout its whole length. He had nearly
reached it when the slow but unmistakable rustle of a dress in the
distance caught his ear. He paused, not only in the interest of
delicacy, but with a sudden nervous thrill he could not account for. The
rustle came nearer--he could hear the distinct frou-frou of satin; and
then, to his bewildered eyes, what seemed to be the figure of the
dummy, arrayed in the pale blue evening dress he knew so well, passed
gracefully and majestically down the corridor. He could see the shapely
folds of the skirt, the symmetry of the bodic