It had, indeed, been lost to the world, unremembered this many a year. But it still remained the first-born of that aspiring heart which had once conceived and laid it in the lap of unapproving mankind. When, in the despair on her new-found sterility, Cordelia made not ungenerous use of that faded and grotesquely bound little volume, during the creation of her own remarkable spiritualistic story which appeared in one of the Sunday papers under the title of A Daughter of Dream, the fair snapper-up of unconsidered trifles had anticipated no slightest word of reproof. But that elderly maiden lady, Miss Florence Hitch, at once beheld and recognized her first-born, stripped as it was of its original swaddling-clothes, and with a maternal and quite natural fury proceeded to fight to the end for her own. It was a spirited and moving struggle, in which the daily press at once took issue, and though Miss Hitch mysteriously and unexpectedly subsided at the end of a two-weeks' warfare, and in carefully dictated phrases attempted to explain away the entire matter as a singular and interesting example of literary parallelism, lingering echoes of that disturbing explosion came to Cordelia from quarters least expected. And those were most unhappy days, when she sat waiting for her daily envelope of carefully labeled articles and news items from her clipping agency, among which she lingered for hours, like a pale dryad amid the thickly falling leaves of autumn. One November night of constant rain, when she could not sleep, her brooding fancy half conceived the thing she was. John Hartley had once told her of that strangest of sights, a salmon-run. She felt that she must live a life like one of those poor creatures, that she must fight, and push, and shoulder, and battle ever up some dark river whose tide was ever against her--must struggle madly on, day by day, losing day by day a little of herself, shoal by shoal and rapid by rapid shedding a little of what had been best and beautiful in her, still panting and pushing on for those unknown and cruelly distant head waters of peace, into which she might finally creep a tattered and half-naked, hideous thing, stripped to the vertebra, a toy of a passionate instinct stronger than her own will, and sweeter, perhaps, than her own life. Yet rest and peace was the one thing which she reached out for, in those troubled days, with thin and futile arms, feeling, even as she did so, that it could never be attained.