Another tenth of August had come round!

Only a man who has but one anniversary in his life, the backward and forward shadows of which make an unbroken circle over the whole year, can appreciate my existence.  One cannot escape such a date.  You may never speak of it.  You may forswear calendars, abjure newspapers, refuse to date a letter; you may even lose days in a drunken stupor.  Still there is that in your heart and your brain which keeps the reckoning.  The hour will strike, in spite of you, when the day comes round on the dial of the year.

I had been living for some time in a city far distant from my native land.  Half the world stretched on either side between me and the spot I tried to forget, and which floated forever, like a vision, between me and reality.

I had remained longer than usual in this city, for the simple reason that it was the hot season, and while the natives could stand it by day, visitors, unused to the heat, were forced to sleep by day and wander abroad by night, a condition that made it possible for me to feel my fellowmen about me nearly the entire twenty-four hours.

It was night.

I was sitting alone on the balcony of my room, looking down on to the crowded bridges of the city where throngs were passing, and filled my eyes and mind.

It was the very hour at which I had last seen her.  There was no clock in sight—­I always guarded against that in selecting my room.  I had long ceased to carry a watch.

Yet I knew the hour.

I had been sitting there for hours watching the crowd.  I had not been drinking.  I had long ago abandoned that.  No stimulant could blur the fixed regret, no narcotic numb my full sense of it.  Sleep, whether I rose to it, or fell to it—­only brought me dreams of her.  Desperate nourishing of a great misery, in a nature that resented it, even while cherishing it, had made me a conscious monomaniac.  Fate had thwarted me, and distorted me.  I had become jealous and morbid, bitterly reviling my hurt, but violently preventing its healing.

There was a moon—­just as there had been that night, only now it fell on a many bridged river across which were ghostly cypress trees, rising along the hillside to a strangely outlined church behind ruined fortifications.  I was wondering, against my will, at what hour that moon rose over the distant New England village, which came before me in a vision that wiped out the wooded heights of reality.

Suddenly all the pain dropped away from me.

I drew a long breath in amazement.

Where was the weight under which I had staggered, mentally, all these years?  Whence came the peace that had so suddenly descended upon me?  In an instant it had passed, and I could only remember my bitter mood of ten years as if it had been a dream that I had lived so long unconsoled by that great healer, Time.

As the torturing jealousy dropped from me, a gentle sadness took its place.  In an instant my mind was made up.  I would go back.