of color rioted and revelled in the crowded clusters.  To what hand but hers could so much beauty have gathered? to what eye but hers did the magnificent secrets of Nature reveal themselves, so that out of a whole forest her careless straying hand should bring only its culminating glories, its most perfect results, whether of leaf or flower or fruit.  For in an urn of tintless alabaster, that had lain centuries in the breathless dust and gloom of an Egyptian tomb, that hand had set a sheaf of gentians, every fringed cup blue as the wild river when a noon sky tints it, or as the vaulted azure of a June midnight on the edge of the Milky Way,—­a sheaf no Ceres owned, no foodfull garner coveted, but the satiating aliment of beauty, fresh as if God that hour had pronounced them good, and set his sign-manual upon each delicate tremulous petal, that might have been sapphire, save for its wistful translucence.  And on the teapoy in the window stood two dainty baskets of clean willow, in which we had that day brought home chestnuts from the wood;—­mine was full of nuts, but they were small and angular and worm-eaten, as the fruitage of a wet season might well be; hers scantily freighted, but every nut round, full, and glossy, perfect from its cruel husk, a specimen, a type of its kind.  And on the handle of the basket hung a little kid glove.  I looked at it closely; the tiny finger-tops and oval nails had left light creases on the delicate leather, and an indescribable perfume, in which violet predominated, drove away the vile animal scent that pervades such gloves.  I flung it on the fire.

All about the room lay books that were not of my culling, from the oak cases, whose every door stood ajar,—­novels innumerable,—­“The Arabian Nights,” Vaughan’s “Silex Scintillans,” with a scarlet leaf laid in against “Peace,” and “Tennyson” turned on its face at “Fatima,” a heavy volume of French moral philosophy, a Methodist hymn-book, Sir Thomas Browne’s “Hydriotaphia,” and a gilded red-bound history of “Five Little Pigs.”

I rang the bell, and ordered all the books to be gathered up and put into an old bookcase, long banished to a dark attic.  I walked to the fire and leaned my head against the mantel.  The embers were all dead; in the gray ashes was the print of a little foot, whose arched instep had left no trace between the light track of the small heel and the deeper impression that the slender toe had left.  That footprint told the secret of her airy motion,—­that step so akin to flight, that on an overhanging mountain-ledge I had more than once held my breath, looking to see her extended wings float over the silent tree-tops below, or longed to grasp her carelessly trailed shawl, that I might detain her upon earth.  To me the track had yet another language.  An hour before, as I stood there beside her, the bitter passion of a man solitary and desperate shaking every faculty before the level rays of her scornful eye, she had set her embroidered slipper in the ashes, and said,—­“Look!  I leave a print there which the first breath of air shall dissipate; all fire becomes ashes, and ashes blow away,”—­and so left me.  I stood before the fire, that had been, still looking at that foot-mark; my brain was stunned and stupid, my heart beat slow and loud; I knew nothing, I felt nothing.  I was nothing.  Presently a bell rang.