And now—this! But this was poetry, this was what his soul had been alight for, this was what the word Poetry meant, the word which always made wings rustle in him when he read it. He sat with his head between his hands, reading on, passionately, absorbedly, his whole being swept away on that mighty current. He remembered that, as he looked up at the house from without, he had compared it to a long-silent bell, and had longed to set its sonorous waves in motion. And behold, the bell was swinging and clanging all about him now, enveloping him in great undulation of sound like the undulations of a summer sea.

But for that inner music the house was utterly silent. The steps and voices of his cousins had died away. The very afternoon light seemed to lie arrested on the page. He seemed to have been sitting there a long time, in this unmoving ecstasy, when something stirred near him, and raising his head he saw a girl standing in the door and looking at him.

"Oh, who wrote this?" he exclaimed breathlessly, pointing to the book.

It was only after he had asked the question, after his voice had sounded aloud in his own ears, that he became conscious of her presence as of something alien, substantial, outside of his own mind, a part of the forgotten world of reality. Then he saw that she was young, tall, and pale, with dark hair banded close under her drooping hat. There was something about her, he saw also, that fitted into the scene, seemed to mark her as a part of it, though he was instantly aware of her being so young, not much older than himself, he imagined. But what were time and space at that moment?

Without surprise, but merely smiling a little, she came up and bent over the book, narrowing her lids slightly in the way of the short-sighted. "That? Why—but Coleridge, of course!" She chanted softly after him:

"'Through caverns measureless to man,

Down to a sunless sea.'"

Vance sat looking up at her. He had heard the "of course," but without heeding it. All he cared for was that she had given him the man's name—the man who had imagined that. His brain was reeling as if he were drunk. He had not thought of moving from his chair, of naming himself to the newcomer, or asking her name.

"Did he write a lot more?" he asked.

She stood by the table, her hands lightly resting on it, and looked down on him with a faint smile. "Yes, he did, worse luck."

"Worse luck—?"

"Because so very little was of that quality." Without taking the book from him, or looking at the page, she went on:

"'But O, that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover … '"