filled my heart and brain.  The very effort to resist the desire of seeing her as I saw everybody else, gave a frenzy and an unnatural tension to my feeling and my manner.  I sat by her side, looking into her eyes, smoothing her hair, folding her to my heart, which was sunken and deep—­why not forever?—­in that dream of peace.  I ran from her presence, and shouted, and leaped with joy, and sat the whole night through, thrilled into happiness by the thought of her love and loveliness, like a wind-harp, tightly strung, and answering the airiest sigh of the breeze with music.  Then came calmer days—­the conviction of deep love settled upon our lives—­as after the hurrying, heaving days of spring, comes the bland and benignant summer.

“‘It is no dream, then, after all, and we are happy,’ I said to her, one day; and there came no answer, for happiness is speechless.

“We are happy then,” I said to myself, “there is no excitement now.  How glad I am that I can now look at her through my spectacles.”

“I feared lest some instinct should warn me to beware.  I escaped from her arms, and ran home and seized the glasses and bounded back again to Preciosa.  As I entered the room I was heated, my head was swimming with confused apprehension, my eyes must have glared.  Preciosa was frightened, and rising from her seat, stood with an inquiring glance of surprise in her eyes.  But I was bent with frenzy upon my purpose.  I was merely aware that she was in the room.  I saw nothing else.  I heard nothing.  I cared for nothing, but to see her through that magic glass, and feel at once, all the fulness of blissful perfection which that would reveal.  Preciosa stood before the mirror, but alarmed at my wild and eager movements, unable to distinguish what I had in my hands, and seeing me raise them suddenly to my face, she shrieked with terror, and fell fainting upon the floor, at the very moment that I placed the glasses before my eyes, and beheld—­myself, reflected in the mirror, before which she had been standing.

“Dear madam,” cried Titbottom, to my wife, springing up and falling back again in his chair, pale and trembling, while Prue ran to him and took his hand, and I poured out a glass of water—­“I saw myself.”

There was silence for many minutes.  Prue laid her hand gently upon the head of our guest, whose eyes were closed, and who breathed softly, like an infant in sleeping.  Perhaps, in all the long years of anguish since that hour, no tender hand had touched his brow, nor wiped away the damps of a bitter sorrow.  Perhaps the tender, maternal fingers of my wife soothed his weary head with the conviction that he felt the hand of his mother playing with the long hair of her boy in the soft West Indian morning.  Perhaps it was only the natural relief of expressing a pent-up sorrow.  When he spoke again, it was with the old, subdued tone, and the air of quaint solemnity.