to him, and he gathered her close. She felt that
it had been a thousand years since she had prayed, yet she heard herself
speaking.... And when he laid her back upon her pillows, she was aware
that together they had approached some height from which they would
never again descend.

"I'll leave the door open," he said, as he left her. "I shall be
reading, and you can see the light."

It seemed as if the light from his room flooded the world. The four
posts of her bed once more were tipped with shining saints! She turned
on her pillow--beyond the garden, the grove of white birches was steeped
in celestial radiance.

"_My little sister, Death_," said good St. Francis.

With her hand under her cheek, she slept at last, as peacefully as a
child.

THE EMPEROR'S GHOST

I

I had not known Tom Randolph a week before I was aware that life was not
real to him. All his world was a stage, with himself as chief player. He
dramatized everything--actions, emotions, income. Thus he made poverty
picturesque, love a thing of the stars, the day's work a tragedy, or, if
the professors proved kind, a comedy. He ate and drank, as it were, to
music, combed his hair and blacked his boots in the glare of footlights;
made exits and entrances of a kind unknown to men like myself who lacked
his sense of the histrionic.

He was Southern and chivalric. His traditions had to do with the doffed
hat and the bent knee. He put woman on a pedestal and kept her there. No
man, he contended, was worthy of her--what she gave was by the grace of
her own sweet charity!

It will be seen that in all this he missed the modern note. As a boy he
had been fed upon Scott, and his later reading had not robbed him of his
sense of life as a flamboyant spectacle.

He came to us in college with a beggarly allowance from an impoverished
estate owned by his grandfather, a colonel of the Confederacy, who after
the war had withdrawn with his widowed daughter to his worthless acres.
In due time the daughter had died, and her child had grown up in a world
of shadows. On nothing a year the colonel had managed, in some
miraculous fashion, to preserve certain hospitable old customs.
Distinguished guests still sat at his table and ate ducks cooked to the
proper state of rareness, and terrapin in a chafing-dish, with a dash of
old sherry. If between these feasts there was famine the world never
knew.

It was perhaps from the colonel that Randolph had learned to