Till one night when the sea fog wrapped a shroud
    Round spar and spire and tarn and tree,
Her soul went up on that lifted cloud
    From this sad old house by the sea.

And ever since then, when the clock strikes two,
    She walks unbidden from room to room,
And the air is filled as she passes through
    With a subtle, sad perfume.

The delicate odor of mignonette,
    The ghost of a dead-and-gone bouquet,
Is all that tells of her story; yet
    Could she think of a sweeter way?

* * * * *

I sit in the sad old house to-night—­
    Myself a ghost from a farther sea;
And I trust that this Quaker woman might,
    In courtesy, visit me.

For the laugh is fled from the porch and lawn,
    And the bugle died from the fort on the hill,
And the twitter of girls on the stairs is gone,
    And the grand piano is still.

Somewhere in the darkness a clock strikes two;
    And there is no sound in the sad old house,
But the long veranda dripping with dew,
    And in the wainscot a mouse.

The light of my study-lamp streams out
    From the library door, but has gone astray
In the depths of the darkened hall; small doubt
    But the Quakeress knows the way.

Was it the trick of a sense o’erwrought
    With outward watching and inward fret? 
But I swear that the air just now was fraught
    With the odor of mignonette!

I open the window and seem almost—­
    So still lies the ocean—­to hear the beat
Of its great Gulf Artery off the coast,
    And to bask in its tropic heat.

In my neighbor’s windows the gas lights flare
    As the dancers swing in a waltz from Strauss;
And I wonder now could I fit that air
    To the song of this sad old house.

And no odor of mignonette there is,
    But the breath of morn on the dewy lawn;
And maybe from causes as slight as this
    The quaint old legend was born.

But the soul of that subtle sad perfume,
    As the spiced embalmings, they say, outlast
The mummy laid in his rocky tomb,
    Awakens my buried past.

And I think of the passion that shook my youth,
    Of its aimless loves and its idle pains,
And am thankful now for the certain truth
    That only the sweet remains.

And I hear no rustle of stiff brocade,
    And I see no face at my library door;
For now that the ghosts of my heart are laid,
    She is viewless forevermore.

But whether she came as a faint perfume,
    Or whether a spirit in stole of white,
I feel, as I pass from the darkened room,
    She has been with my soul to-night.

A LEGEND:  MAY KENDALL

Ay, an old story, yet it might
    Have truth in it—­who knows? 
Of the heroine’s breaking down one night
    Just ere the curtain rose.