We all lead double lives: that which our friends and neighbours know, and that which is invisible within us. Acquaintance gives us the outward aspects of our neighbours, with friendship we penetrate a little way into the deeper life, but when we love there is no glen too secret for us, no upland too elusive, and we worship at the altars of the eternal woods. Long before I knew Anthy well I knew something of her deeper life, something more than that which looked out of her still eyes or marked her quiet countenance. The quality of Anthy's silences were a sign: and I surprised once the look she had when walking alone in a country road. People who are shallow, or whose inner lives are harassed by forms of fear ("most men," as Thoreau says, "live lives of quiet desperation") rarely care to be silent, rarely wish to be alone with themselves; but it is the sign of a noble nature that it has made terms with itself. One of the tragedies of life, perhaps the supreme tragedy, is that we should be unable to follow those we love to their serenest heights. I once knew a man who had lived for twenty years with a woman, and never got beyond what he could see with the eyes of the flesh. The gate to the uplands of the soul long stood open to him (and stands open now no more); he passed that way, too, but he never went in. I do not wish to imply that Anthy was a mere dreamer. She was not, decidedly; but she had, always, her places of retirement. From a child she had friends of her own imagining. The first of them I have already referred to, a certain Richard and Rachel who came out through the wall near the stairway in her father's house, to be the confidants of a lonely child. Others came later as she grew older. I know the names of some of them, and just what they meant to Anthy at particular moments in her life. They came to her, as friends come to us in real life, as we are ripe for them. It was some time after her father's death, when she felt very much alone, that Anthy wrote her first letter to Mr. Lincoln. Her father had made Lincoln one of the most vivid characters of her girlhood: a portrait of him hung over the mantel in the living-room, and there was another at the office. One day, almost involuntarily, she began a letter: DEAR MR. LINCOLN: I wish you were here. My father knew you well and trusted you more than he trusted any other man. He used to say that no other American who ever lived had such an understanding of the hearts of people as you had. I think you would understand some of the troubles I am now having with the _Star_, and that you would help me to be sensible and strong. When I was in college I thought I had begun to know something, but since I have come back here I feel like a very small girl again. I don't _know_ enough to run the _Star_, and yet I cannot let it go---- [Illustration: _She turned around quickly--but there was no one there to see_]