dear to him. Tapestries of rich stuffs were about him,
and the skins of wild animals beneath his feet. Beyond, the twilight
stole through a window, but did not reach where he stood. And in his
close embrace was the woman he loved, with the stamp on her face
of suffering, of desperate resolution, and of conscious, welcomed
weakness. And in his face was the regret for wasted years and
possibilities, and a present, passionate gladness; _that_ he could see
in the mirror of the eyes over which the lids were slowly falling....
And the woman wore a clinging, shining yellow gown, and a blaze of
jewels in her hair. What was said he hardly knew. It was enough to
feel that a suddenly-born, passionate joy was making his pulses leap
and his head reel; to know that heaven had come to him in this soft,
quiet Southern night.

* * * * *

VII.

Dartmouth opened his eyes and looked about him. The storm had died,
the waves were at rest, and he was alone. He let his head fall back
against the frame of the window, and his eyes closed once more. What a
dream!--so vivid!--so realistic! Was it not his actual life? Could
he take up the threads of another? He felt ten years older; and,
retreating down the dim, remote corridors of his brain, were trooping
memories of a long, regretted, troubled, eventful past. In a moment
they had vanished like ghosts and left no trace; he could recall none
of them. He opened his eyes again and looked down the gallery, and
gradually his perceptions grasped its familiar lines, and he was
himself once more. He rose to his feet and put his hand to his head.
That woman whom he had taken for the ghost of one dead and gone had
been Weir, of course. She had arisen in her sleep and attired herself
like the grandmother whose living portrait she was; she had piled up
her hair and caught her white gown up under her bosom; and, in the
shadows and mystery of night, small wonder that she had looked as if
the canvas in the gallery below had yielded her up! But what had her
words meant?--her words, and that dream?--but no--they were not what
he wanted. There had been something else--what was it? He felt as if a
mist had newly arisen to cloud his faculties. There had been something
else which had made him not quite himself as he had stood there with
his arms about the woman who had been Weir, and yet not Weir. Above
the pain and joy and passion which had shaken him, there had been
an unm