How did it come there?  Did the Van Loos know her?  It was taken in Venice; there was the address of the photographers.  The Van Loos were foreigners, he remembered; they had traveled; perhaps had met her there in 1858:  that was the date in her handwriting; that was the date on the photographer’s address—­1858.  Suddenly he laid the photograph down, took with trembling fingers a letter-case from his pocket, opened it, and laid his last letter to her, indorsed with the cruel announcement of her death, before him on the table.  He passed his hand across his forehead and opened the letter.  It was dated 1856!  The photograph must have been taken two years after her alleged death!

He examined it again eagerly, fixedly, tremblingly.  A wild impulse to summon Barker or Stacy on the spot was restrained with difficulty and only when he remembered that they could not help him.  Then he began to oscillate between a joy and a new fear, which now, for the first time, began to dawn upon him.  If the news of her death had been a fiendish trick of her relations, why had she never sought him?  It was not ill health, restraint, nor fear; there was nothing but happiness and the strength of youth and beauty in that face and figure.  He had not disappeared from the world; he was known of men; more, his memorable good fortune must have reached her ears.  Had he wasted all these miserable years to find himself abandoned, forgotten, perhaps even a dupe?  For the first time the sting of jealousy entered his soul.  Perhaps, unconsciously to himself, his strange and varying feelings that afternoon had been the gathering climax of his mental condition; at all events, in the sudden revulsion there was a shaking off of his apathetic thought; there was activity, even if it was the activity of pain.  Here was a mystery to be solved, a secret to be discovered, a past wrong to be exposed, an enemy or, perhaps, even a faithless love to be punished.  Perhaps he had even saved his reason at the expense of his love.  He quickly replaced the photograph on the mantel-shelf, returned the letter carefully to his pocket-book,—­no longer a souvenir of the past, but a proof of treachery,—­and began to mechanically undress himself.  He was quite calm now, and went to bed with a strange sense of relief, and slept as he had not slept since he was a boy.

The whole hotel had sunk to rest by this time, and then began the usual slow, nightly invasion and investment of it by nature.  For all its broad verandas and glaring terraces, its long ranges of windows and glittering crest of cupola and tower, it gradually succumbed to the more potent influences around it, and became their sport and playground.  The mountain breezes from the distant summit swept down upon its flimsy structure, shook the great glass windows as with a strong hand, and sent the balm of bay and spruce through every chink and cranny.  In the great hall and corridors the carpets billowed with the intruding blast along