While I talked, I sketched her and studied her. Young as she seemed, she had been much about the world, knew her Europe, had met and talked with men of many pursuits, and had taken from all sources tribute for her mind and color for her imagination. She had read widely, too, and had an individual habit of thought. Combined with all her cosmopolitanism was a quaint and profound purity of standards. I remember her saying once—it was one of her rare flashes of self-revelation—“I am an anomaly and an anachronism, a Puritan in modern society.” After her first visit she did not ride on her horse; but came across lots and through the side hedge, swinging down the hillside yonder with her light dipping stride that always recalled to me the swoop of a swallow, her gloved hands usually holding a slender stick. All those sketches that you saw were but studies for a more serious attempt to catch and fix her personality. (_Comment by C. K._: _Couldn’t he have given me in two words her height and approximate weight?_) I did it in pastel, and, if I missed something of her tender and changeful coloring, I at least caught the ineffable wistfulness of her expression, the look of one hoping against hope for an unconfessed happiness. Probably I had put more of myself into it than I had meant. A man is likely to when he paints with his heart as well as his brain and hand. When it was done I made a little frame for it, and lettered on the frame this line: “And her eyes dreamed against a distant goal.” It was the next day that she read the line. I saw the color die from her face and flood back again. “Why did you set that line there?” she breathed, her eyes fixed on me with a strange expression. (_Comment by C. K._: _Rossetti again. The dead woman of the beach quoted “The House of Life,” also._) “Why not?” I asked. “It seems to express something in you which I have tried to embody in the picture. Don’t you like it?” She repeated the line softly, making pure music of it. “I love it,” she said. At that, I spoke as it is given to a man to speak to one woman in the world when he has found her. She listened, with her eyes on the pictured face. But when I said to her, “You, who have all my heart, and whose name, even, I have not—is there no word for me,” she rose, and threw out her hands in a gesture that sent a chill through me. “Oh, no! No!” she cried vehemently. “Nothing—except good-by. Oh, why did you speak?” I stood and watched her go. At the end of the garden walk she stooped and picked a rose with her gloved fingers, and as she disappeared in the thicket at the top of the hill I thought she half turned to look. That was five interminable days ago. I have not seen her since. I feel it is her will that I shall never see her again. And I must! You understand, Kent, you must find her!