Africa, into the region of my youth and early boyhood. . . .

And, as though a hand uncovered it deliberately, I recalled an
earliest dream--strangest, perhaps, of all the mysterious dreams of
that far time. It had, I thought, remained unrealized, as, certainly,
till this moment, it had lain forgotten--a boyish dream that behind
the veils of the Future some one waited for me with the patience of a
perfect love that was my due.

The dream reached forward towards some one who must one day appear,
and whose coming would make life sweet and wonderful, fulfilling,
even explaining, the purpose of my being. This dream which I had
thought peculiarly my own, belongs, I learned later, to many, if not
to the race in general, and, with a smile at my own incurable vanity
(and probably a grimace at being neatly duped), I had laid it on one
side. At any rate, I forgot it, for nothing happened to keep it
active, much less revive it.

Now, however, looking backwards, and listening to the singing in the
sky, I recalled what almost seemed to have been its attempt at
realization. Having recovered its earliest appearance, my thought
next leaped forward to the moment that might possibly have been its
reappearance. For memory bore me off without an effort on my part,
and set me abruptly within a room of the house I had come home to,
where Marion sat beside me, singing to the harp she loved. The scene
rose up before me as of yesterday. . . the emotions themselves
reconstituted. I recalled the deep, half-sad desire to be worthy of
her, to persuade myself I loved as she did, even the curious impulse
to acknowledge an emotion that came and went before it could be
wholly realized--the feeling, namely, that I ought to love her