Fortunately, Time treats with kindly hand those tragedies which are imagined as well as those which actually exist. Each year added to the luster of the memory. Marian Seymour herself would not have recognized her own face could Huntington have translated it out of the figments of his mind upon the crude medium of canvas. And, be it said, had Huntington come face to face with the original during these years, it is doubtful whether he would have recognized her; for the idealization had become absolutely real to him. No sculptor had ever modeled hand and arm so perfect as that which the yellowed glove had held; no foot was ever shaped with graceful line equal to that which once the satin slipper had incased. The faithlessness of woman had long since been forgotten, and the sanctity of this romance, which might have been, provided all the details which it would otherwise have lacked. Each year made it more real, until now there was no doubt about it. Other men worshiped at the shrine of departed dear ones with no greater sincerity than did Montgomery Huntington revere this near-romance of his life. So, as he sat there, he was not the bachelor his friends considered him, but rather a man bereft of wife and children. Cosden, knowing nothing of this secret grief, had wantonly torn the veil aside and exposed the wound. Yet, with the sorrow of the widower and the childless, there must have come back to Huntington some memories which were not sad, for when Dixon happened upon him in the morning, soundly sleeping in his favorite chair with this curious exhibit before him, and with a pink slipper firmly grasped within his hand, there was a smile as if of happiness upon his face. And Dixon, discreet valet that he was, showed no surprise, a half-hour later, when he found the table and its strange contents carefully put away without his aid, or when his master summoned him to his room, where he appeared to be just rising as usual from a sleep as restful as it had been unportentous. * * * * * III * * * * * "Then I shall leave Bermuda feeling that my beautiful dream is wholly incomplete." Mrs. Henry Thatcher spoke with a degree of resignation, but her tone signified that the apparent retreat was only to gain strength for a final advance which was sure to gain her point. She knew that this discussion with her husband would end as all their differences of opinion ended, and so did he. Perhaps his opposition was the inevitable expression of his own individuality which every married man likes to make a pretense of preserving; perhaps it pleased him to see his wife's half-playful, half-serious attack upon his own judgment in gently forcing him into a position where her wishes became his desires.