Once again he asked for Miss Trevalyn, instead of inquiring for Mrs. Trevalyn, his thoughts were, alas! so full of the girl he had loved so madly, so deeply--and lost so cruelly. The servant stared for an instant blankly, but in the next he remembered that that was the name of his young mistress before her marriage, and with a low bow invited the gentleman to enter, throwing open the drawing-room door for him. John Dinsmore knew that she would recognize the name his card bore at the first glance. After much consideration he had thought it best to acquaint Mrs. Trevalyn with the true state of affairs before seeing Jess--she being the girl’s hostess, and the one whom she would seek advice from--after he had had his interview with her. He seated himself in the nearest chair and awaited her coming. He had scarcely seated himself ere his eyes fell upon a picture of Queenie, a life-size painting, hanging upon the opposite wall. His heart was in his eyes as he gazed. The old sorrow that he thought he had strangled to death by main force of indomitable will seemed to have sprung instantly into new life. The old sorrow was crying aloud. What vain, wild passion; what deep regret, there was still in his heart! He tried to withdraw his eyes from the fatal beauty of that pictured face, which was, ah! so lifelike, but it seemed impossible for him to do so. A mad desire which he could not repress seemed to draw him toward it, and mechanically he allowed himself to cross the room and stand before it. And he could hardly keep from falling on his knees before it, touching the little hands that seemed so lifelike; and, God help him, to restrain himself from kissing passionately the beautiful lips that he had hungered so to caress from the first moment that he and Queenie Trevalyn had met. The temptation mastered him. “Just once; no one in the wide world will ever know,” he muttered, hoarsely, “and what can it matter; it can do no harm to the soulless canvas,” and, raising his feverish face, he kissed passionately the lips of the picture, not once, but many times. Then he turned away with his heart on fire, and flung himself down into the depths of the great armchair again, burying his face in his trembling hands. “A love such as mine can never die,” he groaned, and he wondered how he should ever be able to meet Queenie face to face, and live through it, if it was such an effort to gain anything like composure when he came suddenly upon her picture in her mother’s drawing-room. He thought of the few happy weeks in which he had sunned himself in the presence of his idol without a care or a thought of how it was to end, although he should have realized the great gulf more clearly that lay between them at that time--she being rich, and he poor as it is the fate of most authors to be. And lines of his own composing, lines which appeared in his book, came to his mind: