“I have been thinking about our conversation and about your book, and I am afraid that I expressed myself badly yesterday.  When I said that one may love and be loved at any age I ought to have added that sometimes this love comes too late.  It comes when one no longer has the right to prove to the loved one how much she is loved, except by love’s sacrifice.  I should like to share with you a human document, as they say to-day, which is in itself a drama with a denouement.  But I must ask you not to use it, for the secret is not my own.”  With the assurance of my discretion he went on:  “I had a friend, a companion of my own age, who, when he was twenty, had loved a young girl.  He was poor, she was rich.  Her family separated them.  The girl married some one else and almost immediately afterward she died.  My friend lived.  Some day you will know for yourself that it is almost as true to say that one recovers from all things as that there is nothing which does not leave its scar.  I had been the confidant of his serious passion, and I became the confidant of the various affairs that followed that first ineffaceable disappointment.  He felt, he inspired, other loves.  He tasted other joys.  He endured other sorrows, and yet when we were alone and when we touched upon those confidences that come from the heart’s depths, the girl who was the ideal of his twentieth year reappeared in his words.  How many times he has said to me, ’In others I have always looked for her and as I have never found her, I have never truly loved any one but her.’”

“And had she loved him?” I interrupted.

“He did not think so,” replied Fauchery.  “At least she had never told him so.  Well, you must now imagine my friend at my age or almost there.  You must picture him growing gray, tired of life and convinced that he had at last discovered the secret of peace.  At this time he met, while visiting some relatives in a country house, a mere girl of twenty, who was the image, the haunting image of her whom he had hoped to marry thirty years before.  It was one of those strange resemblances which extend from the color of the eyes to the ‘timbre’ of the voice, from the smile to the thought, from the gestures to the finest feelings of the heart.  I could not, in a few disjointed phrases describe to you the strange emotions of my friend.  It would take pages and pages to make you understand the tenderness, both present and at the same time retrospective, for the dead through the living; the hypnotic condition of the soul which does not know where dreams and memories end and present feeling begins; the daily commingling of the most unreal thing in the world, the phantom of a lost love, with the freshest, the most actual, the most irresistibly naive and spontaneous thing in it, a young girl.  She comes, she goes, she laughs, she sings, you go about with her in the intimacy of country life, and at her side walks one long dead.  After two weeks of almost careless abandon to the