words. How many times he has said to me, 'In others I have always looked
for her and as I have never found her, I have never truly loved any one
but her.'"

"And had she loved him?" I interrupted.

"He did not think so," replied Fauchery. "At least she had never told him
so. Well, you must now imagine my friend at my age or almost there. You
must picture him growing gray, tired of life and convinced that he had at
last discovered the secret of peace. At this time he met, while visiting
some relatives in a country house, a mere girl of twenty, who was the
image, the haunting image of her whom he had hoped to marry thirty years
before. It was one of those strange resemblances which extend from the
color of the eyes to the 'timbre' of the voice, from the smile to the
thought, from the gestures to the finest feelings of the heart. I could
not, in a few disjointed phrases describe to you the strange emotions of
my friend. It would take pages and pages to make you understand the
tenderness, both present and at the same time retrospective, for the dead
through the living; the hypnotic condition of the soul which does not know
where dreams and memories end and present feeling begins; the daily
commingling of the most unreal thing in the world, the phantom of a lost
love, with the freshest, the most actual, the most irresistibly naïve and
spontaneous thing in it, a young girl. She comes, she goes, she laughs,
she sings, you go about with her in the intimacy of country life, and at
her side walks one long dead. After two weeks of almost careless abandon
to the dangerous delights of this inward agitation imagine my friend
entering by chance one morning one of the less frequented rooms of the
house, a gallery, where, among other pictures, hung a portrait of himself,
painted when he was twenty-five. He approaches the portrait abstractedly.
There had been a fire in the room, so that a slight moisture dimmed the