e Titian or Tintoretto, and, having clothed herself, had
walked forth in this nineteenth century and these United States. She
was a strange and striking figure, and Laurence found it impossible to
analyze exactly the curious and weird impression she produced on him.
Her voice, as she greeted him, gave him a peculiar thrill; and when he
shook hands with her he seemed to feel himself face to face with some
strange being from another land and another century. She inspired him
with a supernatural awe he was not wont to feel in the presence of
woman. He had a dim consciousness that there lingered in his memory
the glimmering image of some woman seen somewhere, he knew not when,
who was like unto the woman before him.

As she took her seat by the side of the bed, she gave Laurence
Laughton a look that seemed to peer into his soul. Laurence felt
himself quiver under it. It was a look to make a man fearful. Then
John Manning, who had moved uneasily as his wife entered, said,
"Laurence, can you see any resemblance in my wife to any one you ever
saw before?"

Their eyes met again, and again Laurence had a vague remembrance as
though he and she had stood face to face before in some earlier
existence. Then his wandering recollections took shape, and he
remembered the face and the form and the haunting mystery of the
expression, and he felt for a moment as though he had been permitted
to peer into the cabalistic darkness of an awful mystery, though he
failed wholly to perceive its occult significance--if significance
there were of any sort.

"I think I do remember," he said at last. "It was in Venice--at the
church of Santa Maria Madalena--the picture there that--"

"You remember aright!" interrupted John Manning. "My wife is the
living image of the Venetian woman for whose beauty Marco Manin was
one day stabbed in the back with a glass stiletto and Giovanni Manin
fled from the place of his birth and never saw it again. It is idle to
fight against the stars in their courses. We met here in the New
World, she and I, as they met in the Old World so long ago--and the
end is the same. It was to be ... it was to be!"

Laurence Laughton gave a swift glance at his friend's wife to see what
effect these words might have on her, and he was startled to detect
on her face the same enigmatic smile which was the chief memory he had
retained of the Venetian picture. Truly, the likeness between the
painting and the wife of his friend was mar