helpless among strangers in a strange land. Sickness, which has
made itself teacher and friend to many a man, had made itself
teacher and friend to me. I looked back with horror at the vices
of my youth; at the fruitless after-days when I had impiously
doubted all that is most noble, all that is most consoling in
human life. Consecrated by sorrow, purified by repentance, was it
vain in me to hope that her spirit a nd my spirit might yet be
united again? Who could tell?

I rose once more. It could serve no good purpose to linger until
night by the banks of the river. I had left the house, feeling
the impulse which drives us, in certain excited conditions of the
mind, to take refuge in movement and change. The remedy had
failed; my mind was as strangely disturbed as ever. My wisest
course would be to go home, and keep my good mother company over
her favorite game of piquet.

I turned to take the road back, and stopped, struck by the
tranquil beauty of the last faint light in the western sky,
shining behind the black line formed by the parapet of the
bridge.

In the grand gathering of the night shadows, in the deep
stillness of the dying day, I stood alone and watched the sinking
light.

As I looked, there came a change over the scene. Suddenly and
softly a living figure glided into view on the bridge. It passed
behind the black line of the parapet, in the last long rays of
the western light. It crossed the bridge. It paused, and crossed
back again half-way. Then it stopped. The minutes passed, and
there the figure stood, a motionless black object, behind the
black parapet of the bridge.

I advanced a little, moving near enough to obtain a closer view
of the dress in which the figure was attired. The dress showed me
that the solitary stranger was a woman.

She did not notice me in the shadow which the trees cast on the
bank. She stood with her arms folded in her cloak, looking down
at the darkening river.

Why was she waiting there at the close of evening alone?

As the question occurred to me, I saw her head move. She looked
along the bridge, first on one side of her, then on the other.
Was she waiting for some person who was to meet her? Or was she
suspicious of observation, and anxious to make sure that she was
alone?

A sudden doubt of her purpose in seeking that solitary place, a
sudden distrust of the lonely bridge and the swift-flowing river,
set my heart beating quickly and roused me to instant action. I
hurried up the rising ground which led from the river-bank to the
bridge, determined on speaking to her while the opportunity was
still mine.

She neither saw nor heard me until I was close to her. I
approached with an irrepressible feeling of agitation; not
knowing how she might receive me when I spoke to her. The moment
she turned and faced me, my composure came back. It was as if,
expecting to see a stranger, I had unexpectedly encountered a
friend.

And yet she _was_ a stranger. I had never before looked on that
grave and noble face, on that grand figure whose exquisite grace
and symmetry even her long cloak could not wholly hide. She was
not, perhaps, a strictly beautiful woman. There were defects in
her which were sufficiently marked to show themselves in the
fading light. Her hair, for example, seen under the large garden
hat that she wore, looked almost as short as the hair of a man;
and the color of it was of that dull, lusterless brown hue which
is so commonly seen in English women of the ordinary type. Still,
in spite of these drawbacks, there was a latent charm in her
expression, there was an inbred fascination in her manner, which
instantly found its way to my sympathies and its hold on my
admiration. She won me in the moment when I first looked at her.

"May I inquire if you have lost your way?" I asked.

Her eyes rested on my face with a strange look of inquiry in
them. She did not appear to be surprised or confused at my
venturing to address her.

"I know this part of the country well," I went on. "Can I be of
any use to you?"

She still looked at me with steady, inquiring eyes. For a moment,
stranger as I was, my face seemed to trouble her as if it had
been a face that she had seen and forgotten again. If she really
had this idea, she at once dismissed it with a little toss of her
head, and looked away at the river as if she felt no further
interest in me.

"Thank you. I have not lost my way. I am accustomed to walking
alone. Good-evening."

She spoke coldly, but courteously. Her voice was delicious; her
bow, as she left me, was the perfection of unaffected grace. She
left the bridge on the side by which I had first seen her


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