“In the Ely Crouch case?  A woman?  There was never any woman hinted at.”

“No.  And there never would have been as long as she was alive.  Now—­Well, I’ll leave Sheldon to explain her.  He loved her, too, in his way.”

In Gale Sheldon’s big, still room, crowded with the friendly ghosts of mighty books, a clear fire was burning.  One shaded lamp at the desk was turned on, for though it was afternoon the blizzard cast a gloom like dusk.  The Little Red Doctor retired to a far corner where he was all but merged in the shadows.

“Have you seen this?” Sheldon asked me, pointing to the table.

Thereon was spread strange literature for the scholarly taste of our local book-worm, a section from the most sensational of New York’s Sunday newspapers.  From the front page, surrounded by a barbarous conglomeration of headlines and uproarious type, there smiled happily forth a face of such appealing loveliness as no journalistic vulgarity could taint or profane.  I recognized it at once, as any one must have done who had ever seen the unforgettable original.  It was Virginia Kingsley, who, two years before, had been Sheldon’s assistant.  The picture was labeled, “Death Ends Wanderlust of Mysterious Heiress,” and the article was couched in a like style of curiosity-piquing sensationalism.  Stripped of its fulsome verbiage, it told of the girl’s recent death in Italy, after traveling about Europe with an invalid sister; during which progress, the article gloated, she was “vainly wooed by the Old World’s proudest nobility for her beauty and wealth,” the latter having been unexpectedly left her by an aged relative.  Her inexorable refusals were set down, by the romantic journalist, as due to some secret and prior attachment. (He termed it an “affair de court"!)

Out of the welter of words there stood forth one sentence to tempt the imagination:  “She met death as a tryst.”  For that brief flash the reporter had been lifted out of his bathos and tawdriness into a clearer element.  One could well believe that she had “met death as a tryst.”  For if ever I have beheld unfaltering hope and unflagging courage glorified and spiritualized into unearthly beauty, it was there in that pictured face, fixed by the imperishable magic of the camera.

“No; I hadn’t seen it,” I said after reading.  “Is it true?”

“In part.”  Then, after a pause, “You knew her, didn’t you, Dominie?”

“Only by sight.  She had special charge of the poetry alcove, hadn’t she?”

“Yes.  She belonged there of right.  She was the soul and fragrance of all that the singers of springtime and youth have sung.”  He sighed, shaking his grizzled head mournfully. “’And all that glory now lies dimmed in death.’  It doesn’t seem believable.”

He rose and went to the window.  Through the whorls of snow could be vaguely seen the outlines of the Worth house, looming on its corner.  He stared at it musing.