hanging by my side, and I could distinctly feel her draperies brushing tremulously against it. You will have the same sensation if you let this scarf brush across your hand--so. This silent drama went on for some weeks. I neglected everything for her. One day Mabel sent for me, and told me she had noticed my abstraction and had drawn her own conclusions, and that, if I were willing, she would like to discontinue the engagement. Willing! I felt like a knave; I was humiliated; I suffered, but I could say nothing. It was a different thing to sit and smile into those red-brown eyes of my vision, and to meet Mabel’s dark, truthful ones, and not to be able to explain anything to her; to feel that for her there was no explanation; to know that I was submerged in a stream of life of which she had no part. Then Mabel’s greatness saved me. She saw my suffering, and she did not press me for any explanation, but told me frankly that she must consider our relations as having reverted to their old standing--we must be only as friends; that she herself saw that her interests were more and more tending toward work among the poor, and her imagination absorbed in plans for the general welfare, rather than in the idea of making one man’s home supremely happy, as it undoubtedly should be made. That was about it. It was noble of her, wasn’t it? I had no choice but to accept her decision. That I wished for that very decision was bitterness to me. I see now that even then I wanted the selfish comfort of being a martyr. Mabel is the noblest woman alive; she has become my saint, instead of my wife.’ ‘But you have your phantom eyes left,’ said Mark, dryly. ‘Yes, she came again that night. In my exultant humiliation I was rash: I closed my hand on the drapery that fluttered against it. I closed my hand. The smiling eyes grew large with surprise and alarm, and the face vanished--I held in my hand this scarf.’ There was silence. Then Rob continued: ‘I have sat here every night since then, often till after midnight: the face has never come back. For a while I expected to see the scarf vanish. I held it tightly for most of the night, and finally went to sleep with it wrapped closely around my arm and hand. It did not vanish--I have ceased to fear that. I know that somehow or other it has taken its material form for me, and however it came, it came from someone, and I shall meet her, whoever she is; wherever she is, she is mine. She will become mine, she waits for me. I shall carry this scarf across the sea; I shall travel with it till I meet her; she will recognize it and me; the scarf is my credential; no matter where we meet, I shall know her by her red-brown eyes and pointed chin; she will know this’--and he fluttered the full length of the scarf in the air. It shimmered and doubled on itself, and coiled and shifted in sentient evolutions as it fell again to his knee.