He stopped short, interrupting himself with a half-cough of laughter as he remembered the inspiration of these verses.  He had written them three months ago, at home in Cranston, Ohio, the evening after Anna McCord’s “coming-out tea.”  “Milady” meant Mrs. McCord; she had “stilled” the conversation of her guests when Mary Kramer (whom the poem called a “sweet, pale singer”) rose to sing Mavourneen; and the stanza closed with the right word to rhyme with “glove.”  He felt a contemptuous pity for his little, untraveled, provincial self of three months ago, if, indeed, it could have been himself who wrote verses about Anna McCord’s “coming-out tea” and referred to poor, good old Mrs. McCord as “Milady”!

The second stanza had intimated a conviction of a kind which only poets may reveal: 

She sang to that great assembly,
They thought, as they praised her tone;
But she and my heart knew better: 
Her song was for me alone.

He had told the truth when he wrote of Mary Kramer as pale and sweet, and she was paler, but no less sweet, when he came to say good-by to her before he sailed.  Her face, as it was at the final moment of the protracted farewell, shone before him very clearly now for a moment:  young, plaintive, white, too lamentably honest to conceal how much her “God-speed” to him cost her.  He came very near telling her how fond of her he had always been; came near giving up his great trip to remain with her always.

“Ah!” He shivered as one shivers at the thought of disaster narrowly averted.  “The fates were good that I only came near it!”

He took from his breast-pocket an engraved card, without having to search for it, because during the few days the card had been in his possession the action had become a habit.

“Comtesse de Vaurigard,” was the name engraved, and below was written in pencil:  “To remember Monsieur Robert Russ Mellin he promise to come to tea Hotel Magnifique, Roma, at five o’clock Thursday.”

There had been disappointment in the first stages of his journey, and that had gone hard with Mellin.  Europe had been his goal so long, and his hopes of pleasure grew so high when (after his years of saving and putting by, bit by bit, out of his salary in a real-estate office) he drew actually near the shining horizon.  But London, his first stopping-place, had given him some dreadful days.  He knew nobody, and had not understood how heavily sheer loneliness—­which was something he had never felt until then—­would weigh upon his spirits.  In Cranston, where the young people “grew up together,” and where he met a dozen friends on the street in a half-hour’s walk, he often said that he “liked to be alone with himself.”  London, after his first excitement in merely being there, taught him his mistake, chilled him with weeks of forbidding weather, puzzled and troubled him.