burning face I turned.

I have in my mind a thousand pictures of one woman. But of them all
the one I love most, the one on which I dwell most as I sit of an
evening with my pipe and my unopened book, is that which I first saw
when I sought the chit who noticed my ill-timed applause and laughed at
me. I found her. I saw that she laughed with me and for me, and I
laughed too. We laughed together. An instant, and her face became
grave.

The orator, now swelling into his peroration, was forgotten. The
people of the valley--Tim--even Tim--all of them were forgotten. I had
found the woman of my firelight, the woman of my cloudland, the woman
of my sunset country down in the mountains to the west. She, had
always been a vague, undefined creature to me--just a woman, and so
elusive as never to get within the grasp of my mind's eye; just a woman
whom I had endowed with every grace; whose kindly spirit shone through
eyes, now brown, now blue, now black, according to my latest whim; who
ofttimes worn, or perhaps feigning weariness, rested on my shoulder a
little head, crowned with a glory of hair sometimes black, and
sometimes golden or auburn, and not infrequently red, a dashing, daring
red. Sometimes she was slender and elf-like, a chic and clinging
creature. Again she was tall and stately, like the women of the
romances. Again she was buxom and blooming, one whose hand you would
take instead of offering an arm. She had been an elusive,
ever-changing creature, but now that I had looked into those grave,
gray eyes, I fixed the form of my picture, and fixed its colors and
fired them in to last for all my time.

Now she is just the woman that every woman ought to be. Her hair is