While trails of scent, like cobweb's films Slender and faint and rare, Of roses, and rich, fair fabrics, Cling on the stirless air, The sibilance of voices, At a wave of Milady's glove, Is stilled-- He stopped short, interrupting himself with a half-cough of laughter as he remembered the inspiration of these verses. He had written them three months ago, at home in Cranston, Ohio, the evening after Anna McCord's “coming-out tea.” “Milady” meant Mrs. McCord; she had “stilled” the conversation of her guests when Mary Kramer (whom the poem called a “sweet, pale singer”) rose to sing Mavourneen; and the stanza closed with the right word to rhyme with “glove.” He felt a contemptuous pity for his little, untraveled, provincial self of three months ago, if, indeed, it could have been himself who wrote verses about Anna McCord's “coming-out tea” and referred to poor, good old Mrs. McCord as “Milady”! The second stanza had intimated a conviction of a kind which only poets may reveal: She sang to that great assembly, They thought, as they praised her tone; But she and my heart knew better: Her song was for me alone. He had told the truth when he wrote of Mary Kramer as pale and sweet, and she was paler, but no less sweet, when he came to say good-by to her before he sailed. Her face, as it was at the final moment of the protracted farewell, shone before him very clearly now for a moment: young, plaintive, white, too lamentably honest to conceal how much her “God-speed” to him cost her. He came very near telling her how fond of her he had always been; came near giving up his great trip to remain with her always. “Ah!” He shivered as one shivers at the thought of disaster narrowly averted. “The fates were good that I only came near it!” He took from his breast-pocket an engraved card, without having to search for it, because during the few days the card had been in his possession the action had become a habit. “Comtesse de Vaurigard,” was the name engraved, and below was written in pencil: “To remember Monsieur Robert Russ Mellin he promise to come to tea Hotel Magnifique, Roma, at five o'clock Thursday.”