first shot, he was so wholly taken with the beauty of the fountain-burst
from the sea which followed; and as he spoke the fan-like spray rose and
expanded itself before his eyes, quite blotting out the visage of a
young widow across the table. In his swift recognition of the fact and
his reflection upon it, he realized that the effect was quite as if he
had been looking at some intense light, almost as if he had been looking
at the sun, and that the illusion which had blotted out the agreeable
reality opposite was of the quality of those flying shapes which repeat
themselves here, there, and everywhere that one looks, after lifting the
gaze from a dazzling object. When his consciousness had duly registered
this perception, there instantly followed a recognition of the fact that
the eidolon now filling his vision was not the effect of the dazzled
eyes, but of a mental process, of thinking how the thing which it
reported had looked.

By the time Alford had co-ordinated this reflection with the other, the
eidolon had faded from the lady's face, which again presented itself in
uninterrupted loveliness with the added attraction of a distinct pout.

"Well, Mr. Alford!" she bantered him.

"Oh, I beg your pardon! I was thinking--"

"Not of what I was saying," she broke in, laughingly, forgivingly.

"No, I certainly wasn't," he assented, with such a sense of approaching
creepiness in his experience that when she challenged him to say what
he _was_ thinking of, he could not, or would not; she professed to
believe that he would not.