years ago. These solemn eyes were looking into the eyes of death, and
the face, frightfully emaciated, yet so young and brave, sunk in the
rich masses of hair. It was too pitiful.

Callender had taken a package of manuscript from the envelope; the long
supple fingers were busy among the leaves, and he bent his head to see
the numbered pages. At last, having arranged them in order, he leaned
back again in his chair, holding the papers tenderly in his hand. There
was nothing of the _poseur_ in Callender; his childlike simplicity of
manner invested him with a touching dignity even though he owned himself
vanquished, where another man would have faced life more bravely, nor
have held it entirely worthless because of one narrow grave which shut
forever from the light a woman who had never loved him.

"I think you would like to read this," he said at length. "And I would
like to have you. To her, it cannot matter. I wanted to marry her,
toward the end, so I could take care of her.--She was poor, you
know--but she would not consent. She left me this, without any message.
I knew her so well, she thought it would be easier for me to forget
her; but now I shall never forget her."

He gave me the little package of leaves, whose rough edges showed that
they had been hurriedly cut from a binding, and then he fell again into
his old lethargic attitude. I am not an imaginative man, but a faint
odor from the paper brought like a flash to my mind the brilliant,
mutinous face, radiant with color and life, that I had seen last across
a sea of white shoulders and black coats at a reception a few weeks
before I went to South America. The writing was the hurried, illegible
hand of an author. I thought grimly that I had probably chanced upon a
much weakened and Americanized Marie Bashkirtseff, for though I had only