coming down through the bare branches of the trees
and a cold mist was rising from the Seine.

I FELT out of tune with the universe.

THE rain irritated me.

TO cheer my drooping spirits I took refuge in the Louvre.

THERE I found no solace in the cold white statues of the lower floor. I
ascended one of the broad staircases--the headless beauty of the
Victoire de Samothrace only made me shudder.

I PASSED through the halls lined on either side with the masterpieces of
French and Italian and Spanish Artists.

ONE in my depressed state of mind had no right to be there where faces
of Madonnas smile down as one passes and deserve a freer look than mine
to turn on them.

I WANDERED out again into the street.

I WALKED up the quai which winds along the river and where the quaint
well-known bookshelves are built displaying to the passerby rare old
books and piles of rubbish alike.

DESPITE the rain several students were eagerly looking through these
stores of hidden wealth.

AS the Parisian would say ils bouquinaient.

SO I too began to pick up at random several old volumes.

AN English one caught my glance--

IT was a copy of Browning--old and tattered--and pencil-marked. Turning
to the fly-leaf I saw a name, written in a woman's hand--

VICTORIA O'FALLON--Paris 18--

I LOOKED up--and saw far back into now almost forgotten years of my life
and there flashed into unaccountable and extraordinary vividness in my
mind the remembrance of a western mining camp and of a girl, Vicky
O'Fallon. She was a little red-headed beauty, who dreamed and talked of
nothing but the stage, who longed to study and to travel, to release her
life from the coarse and rude environment in which she lived.

AND I questioned almost passionately, could that little, discontented
Irish girl be the same one whose name on an old yellowing page was
intriguing my thought? How came her book here among these old volumes?
Had some strange fate transplanted her to Paris in the year 18--? Had
her dreams come true and was she on the stage in this great city of the
world? I asked of the bookseller how this copy of Browning had come
into his hands. He did not know.

I COULD not dismiss this girl, I could not forget the book.

SOMEWHERE, somehow she had read Browning. She obsessed my mind.

SHE possessed my waking hours. I wandered from theatre to theatre,
watching at the stage doors, and saw play after play, always in the hope
of discovering thi