Much has been written about the power of the mind to reproduce minute details of a scene that has served as the setting for some great emotion; the pattern of a table-cover or a rug, the flowers in a vase, the titles of the books, the strain of music being played in the next room—all stand out, separate and distinct, indelibly imprinted upon the memory. There is another variety of the same phenomena, seldom commented on, where an entirely unreal impression of the scene as a whole is left on the mind by one or two details. To Dosia, sitting there by the little plot of tulips, the sun was the brilliant sun of July, and those scarlet tulips a garden wide and far-reaching, an endless vista of flowers, the blue sky an endless vault above her—high noon and midsummer, with that sweet-scented warmth at the busy heart of things, a circle of infinite life humming in the low grasses, in the almost windless, hardly stirring air. Warmth and color and life, at high noon, listening close to the heart of things. And Dosia! She had never supposed that any girl could care for a man until he had shown that he cared for her—it was the unmaidenly, impossible thing. And now—how beautiful he was, how dear! A wistful smile trembled around her lips. All that had gone before with other men suddenly became as nothing, forgotten and out of mind, and she herself made clean by this purifying fire. Even if she never had anything more in her whole life, she had this—even if she never had anything more. Yet what had she? Nothing and less than nothing. If he had ever thought of her, if he had ever dreamed of her, if her soft, frightened hand trustfully clinging fast to his, only to be comforted by his touch, had been a sign and a symbol to him of some dearer trust and faith for him alone—if in some way, as she dimly visioned it, the thought had once been his, it had gone long ago. Every action showed it. And yet, and yet—so unconquerably does the soul speak that, though he might deny her attraction for him, she knew that she had it. It was something to which he might never give way, but it was unalterably there—as it was unalterably there with her. All that year at home, when she believed she had not been thinking of him, she really had been thinking of him. We learn to know each other sometimes in long absences. She began to perceive in him now a humility and a pride strangely at variance with each other, and both equally at variance with the bright assurance of his outer manner. He gave to everyone; he would work early and late for others, in his yearning sympathy and affection: yet he himself, from the very intenseness of his desire for it, stood aloof, and drew back from the insistence of any claim for himself. They might meet a hundred times and grow no closer; they might grow farther and farther away.