He glanced up with some surprise at her exclamation, but was too much interested in his subject to take much notice of it. "You know," he said, "there are great differences in the distinctness with which we can bring up our memories. Very well! The only question is, What is the limit to that distinctness, or is there any? Since we know there are such wide degrees in distinctness, the burden of proof rests on those who would prove that those degrees stop short of any particular point. Don't you see, then, that it might be possible to see them?" And to enforce his meaning he laid his hand lightly on hers as it rested on the window-seat. She withdrew it instantly from the contact, and a slight flush tinged her sallow cheeks. The only outward trace of her memory of their youthful relations was the almost prudish chariness of her person by which she indicated a sense of the line to be drawn between the former lover and the present friend. "Something in your look just now," he said, regarding her musingly, as one who seeks to trace the lineaments of a dead face in a living one, "reminds me of you as you used to sit in this very window as a girl, and I stood just here, and we picked out stars together. There! now it's gone;" and he turned away regretfully. She looked at his averted face with a blank piteousness which revealed all her secret. She would not have had him see it for worlds, but it was a relief just for a moment to rest her features in the sad cast which the muscles had grown tired in repressing. The autumn scent rose stronger as the air grew damp, and he stood breathing it in, and apparently feeling its influence like some Delphian afflatus. "Is there anything, Mary--is there anything so beautiful as that light of eternity that rests on the figures of memory? Who that has once felt it can care for the common daylight of the present any more, or take pleasure in its prosaic groups?" "You'll certainly catch cold standing in that wet grass: do come in and let me shut the blinds," she said, for she had found cheerful lamplight the best corrective for his vagaries.