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The latching of the gate broke up her depressing reverie, and banished the pinched and pining look from her features. Among the neighbors Miss Rood was sometimes called a sour old maid, but the face she kept for Mr. Morgan would never have suggested that idea to the most ill-natured critic.

He stopped at the window, near which the walk passed to the doorway, and stood leaning on the sill,–a tall, slender figure, stooping a little, with smooth, scholarly face, and thin iron-gray hair. His only noticeable feature was a pair of eyes whose expression and glow indicated an imaginative temperament. It was pleasant to observe the relieved restlessness in the look and manner of the two friends, as if at the mere being in each other’s presence, though neither seemed in any haste to exchange even the words of formal greeting.

At length she said, in a tone of quiet satisfaction, “I knew you would come, for I was sure this deathly autumn’s flavor would make you restless. Is n’t it strange how it affects the nerves of memory, and makes one sad with thinking of all the sweet, dear days that are dead?”

“Yes, yes,” he answered eagerly; “I can think of nothing else. Do they not seem wonderfully clear and near to-night? To-night, of all nights in the year, if the figures and scenes of memory can be reembodied in visible forms, they ought to become so to the eyes that strain and yearn for them.”

“What a fanciful idea, Robert!”

“I don’t know that it is; I don’t feel sure. Nobody understands the mystery of this Past, or what are the conditions of existence in that world. These memories, these forms and faces, that are so near, so almost warm and visible that we find ourselves smiling on the vacant air where they seem to be, are they not real and living?”

“You don’t mean you believe in ghosts?”

“I am not talking of ghosts of the dead, but of ghosts of the past,– memories of scenes or persons, whether the persons are dead or not– of our own selves as well as others. Why,” he continued, his voice softening into a passionate, yearning tenderness, “the figure I would give most to see just once more is yourself as a girl, as I remember you in the sweet grace and beauty of your maidenhood. Ah, well! ah, well!”

“Don’t!” she cried involuntarily, while her features contracted in sudden pain.

In the years during which his passion for her had been cooling into a staid friendship, his imagination had been recurring with constantly increasing fondness and a dreamy passion to the memory of her girlhood. And the cruelest part of it was that he so unconsciously and unquestioningly assumed that she could not have identity enough with that girlish ideal to make his frequent glowing references to it even embarrassing. Generally, however, she heard and made no sign, but the suddenness of his outburst just now had taken her off her guard.

He glanced up with some surprise at her exclamation, but was too much interested in his subject to take much notice of it. “You know,” he said, “there are great differences in the distinctness with which we can bring up our memories. Very well! The only question is, What is the limit to that distinctness, or is there any? Since we know there are such wide degrees in distinctness, the burden of proof rests on those who would prove that those degrees stop short of any particular point. Don’t you see, then, that it might be possible to see them?” And to enforce his meaning he laid his hand lightly on hers as it rested on the window-seat.

She withdrew it instantly from the contact, and a slight flush tinged her sallow cheeks. The only outward trace of her memory of their youthful relations was the almost prudish chariness of her person by which she indicated a sense of the line to be drawn between the former lover and the present friend.