To his surprise she was not disconcerted; rather a look of animation lit up her face as she said brightly, “Oh, then, you can of course satisfy my curiosity about something. You know the road from San Francisco to the Cliff House. Except for the view of the sea-lions when one gets there it's stupid; my brother says it's like all the San Francisco excursions,--a dusty drive with a julep at the end of it. Well, one day we were coming back from a drive there, and when we were beginning to wind along the brow of that dreadful staring Lone Mountain Cemetery, I said I would get out and walk, and avoid the obtrusive glitter of those tombstones rising before me all the way. I pushed open a little gate and passed in. Once among these funereal shrubs and cold statuesque lilies everything was changed; I saw the staring tombstones no longer, for, like them, I seemed to be always facing the sea. The road had vanished; everything had vanished but the endless waste of ocean below me, and the last slope of rock and sand. It seemed to be the fittest place for a cemetery,--this end of the crumbling earth,--this beginning of the eternal sea. There! don't think that idea my own, or that I thought of it then. No,--I read it all afterwards, and that's why I'm telling you this.” She could not help smiling at his now attentive face, and went on: “Some days afterwards I got hold of a newspaper four or six months old, and there was a description of all that I thought I had seen and felt,--only far more beautiful and touching, as you shall see, for I cut it out of the paper and have kept it. It seemed to me that it must be some personal experience,--as if the writer had followed some dear friend there,--although it was with the unostentation and indefiniteness of true and delicate feeling. It impressed me so much that I went back there twice or thrice, and always seemed to move to the rhythm of that beautiful funeral march--and I am afraid, being a woman, that I wandered around among the graves as though I could find out who it was that had been sung so sweetly, and if it were man or woman. I've got it here,” she said, taking a dainty ivory porte-monnaie from her pocket and picking out with two slim finger-tips a folded slip of newspaper; “and I thought that maybe you might recognize the style of the writer, and perhaps know something of his history. For I believe he has one. There! that is only a part of the article, of course, but it is the part that interested me. Just read from there,” she pointed, leaning partly over his shoulder so that her soft breath stirred his hair, “to the end; it isn't long.”