long ceased to carry a watch.

Yet I knew the hour.

I had been sitting there for hours watching the crowd. I had not been
drinking. I had long ago abandoned that. No stimulant could blur the
fixed regret, no narcotic numb my full sense of it. Sleep, whether I
rose to it, or fell to it--only brought me dreams of her. Desperate
nourishing of a great misery, in a nature that resented it, even while
cherishing it, had made me a conscious monomaniac. Fate had thwarted
me, and distorted me. I had become jealous and morbid, bitterly
reviling my hurt, but violently preventing its healing.

There was a moon--just as there had been that night, only now it fell
on a many bridged river across which were ghostly cypress trees,
rising along the hillside to a strangely outlined church behind ruined
fortifications. I was wondering, against my will, at what hour that
moon rose over the distant New England village, which came before me
in a vision that wiped out the wooded heights of reality.

Suddenly all the pain dropped away from me.

I drew a long breath in amazement.

Where was the weight under which I had staggered, mentally, all these
years? Whence came the peace that had so suddenly descended upon me?
In an instant it had passed, and I could only remember my bitter mood
of ten years as if it had been a dream that I had lived so long
unconsoled by that great healer, Time.