but as he had come thither with the purpose, at once firm and vague, of
giving it a memory, he could afford to sigh till morning's light
brought, maybe, the opportunity of that transfiguring action. He was to
spend an Easter fortnight there, as the guest of some farmer-relatives
with whom he had stayed years before, in a period to which, being
nineteen, he already alluded as his 'boyhood.'

And it is not quite accurate to say that it had no memory for him, for
he brought with him one of that very miller's daughter, though, indeed,
it was of the shadowiest silver. It had chanced at that early time that
an influx of visitors to the farm had exceeded the sleeping room, and he
and another little fellow had been provided with a bed in the miller's
house. He had never quite forgotten that bedroom--its huge old-fashioned
four-poster, slumbrous with great dark hangings, such as Queen Elizabeth
seems always to have slept in; its walls dim with tapestry, and its
screen of antique bead-work. But it was round the toilet table that
memory grew brightest, for thereon was a crystal phial of a most
marvellous perfume, and two great mother-of-pearl shells, shedding a
mystical radiance--the most commonplace Rimmel's, without doubt, and the
shells 'dreadful,' one may be sure. But to him, as he took a reverent
breath of that phial, it seemed the very sweetbriar fragrance of her
gown that caught his sense; and, surely, he never in all the world found
scent like that again. Thus, long after, she would come to him in
day-dreams, wafted on its strange sweetness, and clothed about with that
mystical lustre of pearl.

There were five years between him and that memory as he stepped into
that enchanted land for the second time. The sweet figure of young
womanhood to which he had turned his boyish soul in hopeless worship,
when it should have been busied rather with birds' nests and