f her I would tremble
and grow faint, and I had not the strength to reach for it. She would
look at me with eyes that laughed despite the resolution of the mouth.
Then the eyes would grow pitiful at my helplessness, and she would
murmur my name. There was some reason which I never fathomed why she
could not give me the water, and her own suffering seemed greater than
mine because of it. So great did it seem that I forgot my own and sought
to comfort her. Then she would go away, very slowly, and I would hear
her calling to me in the wind, from the stars to which I looked up from
the prairie. It was she, I thought, who ordered the world. Who, when
women were lost and men cried out in distress, came to them calmly,
ministered to them deftly.

Once--perhaps a score of times, I cannot tell--was limned on the
ceiling, where the cracks were, her miniature, and I knew what was
coming and shuddered and cried aloud because I could not stop it. I
saw the narrow street of a strange city deep down between high
houses,--houses with gratings on the lowest windows, with studded,
evil-looking doors, with upper stories that toppled over to shut out the
light of the sky, with slated roofs that slanted and twisted this way
and that and dormers peeping from them. Down in the street, instead of
the King's white soldiers, was a foul, unkempt rabble, creeping out
of its damp places, jesting, cursing, singing. And in the midst of the
rabble a lady sat in a cart high above it unmoved. She was the lady of
the miniature. A window in one of the jutting houses was flung open,
a little man leaned out excitedly, and I knew him too. He was Jean
Baptiste Lenoir, and he cried out in a shrill voice:--

"You must take off her ruff, citizens. You must take off her ruff!"

There came a blessed day when my thirst was gone, when I looked up at
the cracks in the ceiling and wondered why they did not change into
horrors. I watched them a long, long time, and it seemed incredible
that they should still remain cracks. Beyond that I would not go, into
speculation I dared not venture. They remained cracks, and I went to
sleep thanking God. When I awoke a breeze came in cool, fitful gusts,
and on it the scent of camellias. I thought of turning my head, and I
remember wondering for a long time over the expediency of this move.
What would happen if I did! Perhaps the visions would come back, perhaps
my head would come off. Finally I decided to risk it, and the first