“It is Fate!”

So he had been there in the flesh—­near her—­in the shadows of that mystic night!  The presence was no creation of an overwrought imagination.  It was Fate.

Tremulously she penned her answer to his appeal, but was it Fate again, which caused the letter to miscarry?  It reached him finally, in Richmond—­Richmond, of all places!—­whither he had gone to deliver to audiences of his old friends, his lecture upon “The Poetic Principle,” in the interest of the establishment of his magazine, The Stylus.  What could have been more fitting than that the gracious words of “Helen of a thousand dreams” should come to him in Richmond?

* * * * *

Not many days later and he was under her own roof in Providence.

He waited in the dimness of her curtained drawing-room, ear strained for the first sound of her footstep.  Noiselessly as a sunbeam or a shadow she entered the room, her gauzy white draperies floating about her slight figure as she came, while his great eyes drank in with reverent joy each detail of her ethereal loveliness—­her face, the same he had seen in the garden, pale as a pearl and as softly radiant, and framed in clustering dark ringlets which escaped in profusion from the confinement of a lacy widow’s cap—­the tremulous mouth—­the eyes, mysterious and unearthly, from which the soul looked out.

For one moment she paused in the doorway, her hand pressed upon her wildly beating heart—­then, with hesitating step advanced to meet him.  Her words of greeting were few, and so low and faltering as to be quite unintelligible, but the tones of her voice fell on his ear like strangely familiar music.

The man spoke no word.  As her eyes rested for one brief moment upon his, then fell before the intensity of his gaze, he was conscious of spiritual influences beyond the reach of reason.  In a tremulous ecstacy he bent and pressed his lips upon the hand that lay within his own and it was with difficulty that he restrained himself from falling upon his knees before her in actual worship.

Three evenings of “all heavenly delight” he spent in her companionship—­sometimes in the seclusion and dusk of her quiet drawing-room, sometimes walking among the roses in her garden, or among the mossy tombs in the town cemetery—­their sympathetic natures finding expression in such conversation as poets delight in.  Under the intoxicating spell of her presence all other dreams passed, for the time, into nothingness and he passionately cried,

“Helen, I love now—­now—­for the first and only time!”

Yet he was poor, and the weaknesses which had caused him to fall in the past might cause him to fall in the future.  How could he plead for a return of his love?

His very self-abasement made his plea more strong.  Still, she did not yield too suddenly.  True, she too, was under the spell, but she resisted it.  As he found his voice, and his eloquence filled the room a restlessness possessed her.  Now she sat quite still by his side, now rose and wandered about the apartment—­now stood with her hand resting upon the back of his chair while his nearness thrilled her.