In the outside further corner of the room a narrow, steep flight of steps led to the second story and lent a queer little foreign air to the whole. Ascending, I found myself in a small room with one door--its only entrance--and one window. For a moment I had a curious sense of the English barracks and seemed to be in the major's sleeping-room again. A low cot-bed with a narrow rug beside, a pine washing-stand and a chest of drawers, a straight chair and small bed-table with a reflecting candle and match box upon it, and a flat tin bath furnished this room, which was, like all the others, speckless. A small shaving-mirror was attached at convenient height near the window; razor and strop hung beside it. All this I took in at a glance, without turning, but when I did turn and confronted the entrance wall, I caught my breath. For there on the space directly opposite the bed hung what, for a moment, I took to be a portrait of Margarita. I moved closer and saw that it was a wonderfully perfect etching of a head by Henner--a first impression, beyond a doubt. It was a girl's head, half life size, almost in profile, white against the dark rain of her hair, which covered her shoulders and bust and blackened all the rest of the picture. The haunting melancholy, the youth, the purity of that face have become so associated with Margarita and her home and that part of my life that I can never separate them, though it has been more than once pointed out to me, and fairly, I dare say, that the picture does not resemble her so much as I think, that her type of beauty is larger, less conventional, infinitely richer, and that, aside from the really unusually suggestive accident of her likeness, it is only a general effect. Well, well, it may be. But I dare to believe that I understand, perhaps better than anybody, why it hung facing that bare cot-bed, and what it meant to the man who slept so many years of his life there, dreaming of the woman for whose sake he hung it. He knew what it recalled to him even as I know what it means to me, and to both of us it was more than any portrait. For we are fearfully and wonderfully made so that no reality shall ever content us, and those sudden sunsets and bars of music and the meaning glance of pictured eyes are to teach us this.... The picture (etched by Waltner) was framed in a broad band of dull gold, and under it, on a very slender, delicately carved teak-wood stand whose inlaid top just held it, was a silver bowl full of orange and yellow and flaming nasturtiums. They were quite fresh and must have been put there that morning, for the dew was still on the pale leaves. It was inexpressibly touching, this altar-like, vivid touch in the austere room, and I stood, drowned in a wave of pity and passionate regret--for what I could not quite tell--before it, overwhelmed by the close, compelling pressure of these mysterious dead loves: all over now and gone? Ah, who knows? Who can know? Not Darwin nor Huxley, be sure!