It was one of those gray days so frequent in Paris in the late fall. A drizzling rain was coming down through the bare branches of the trees and a cold mist was rising from the Seine.

I felt out of tune with the universe.

The rain irritated me.

To cheer my drooping spirits I took refuge in the Louvre.

There I found no solace in the cold white statues of the lower floor. I ascended one of the broad staircases—the headless beauty of the Victoire de Samothrace only made me shudder.

I passed through the halls lined on either side with the masterpieces of French and Italian and Spanish Artists.

One in my depressed state of mind had no right to be there where faces of Madonnas smile down as one passes and deserve a freer look than mine to turn on them.

I wandered out again into the street.

I walked up the quai which winds along the river and where the quaint well-known bookshelves are built displaying to the passerby rare old books and piles of rubbish alike.

Despite the rain several students were eagerly looking through these stores of hidden wealth.

As the Parisian would say ils bouquinaient.

So I too began to pick up at random several old volumes.

An English one caught my glance—

It was a copy of Browning—old and tattered—and pencil-marked. Turning to the fly-leaf I saw a name, written in a woman's hand—

Victoria O'Fallon—Paris 18—

I looked up—and saw far back into now almost forgotten years of my life and there flashed into unaccountable and extraordinary vividness in my mind the remembrance of a western mining camp and of a girl, Vicky O'Fallon. She was a little red-headed beauty, who dreamed and talked of nothing but the stage, who longed to study and to travel, to release her life from the coarse and rude environment in which she lived.

And I questioned almost passionately, could that little, discontented Irish girl be the same one whose name on an old yellowing page was intriguing my thought? How came her book here among these old volumes? Had some strange fate transplanted her to Paris in the year 18—? Had her dreams come true and was she on the stage in this great city of the world? I asked of the bookseller how this copy of Browning had come into his hands. He did not know.

I could not dismiss this girl, I could not forget the book.

Somewhere, somehow she had read Browning. She obsessed my mind.

She possessed my waking hours. I wandered from theatre to theatre, watching at the stage doors, and saw play after play, always in the hope of discovering this girl I had scarcely known. I studied hotel registers, old play-bills, and always old books. I had not thought of her for years and now I desired more than anything else in life to see once more her dancing blue eyes and hear again her laughter.

But it was all in vain that I scanned faces in the streets, in railway stations, in passing cabs. I could find no trace of Victoria O'Fallon.

Years passed.

I was travelling one dull English day from London to Glasgow. In the railway carriage toward night I fell into desultory talk with a sad uneasy looking man who shared the compartment with me. At some turn in the conversation he told me his name was O'Fallon.

The worn copy of Browning seemed almost to take form in my hand—and Victoria—her dream, her hair, her enchanting laugh.

For moments I was too dazed to speak. Then I managed to ask if by any chance he was related to a girl Victoria O'Fallon. He stared at me in silence, while a look of hatred and despair distorted his face.

Finally in a choked voice he breathed rather than spoke—

I am just out of prison because of Victoria O'Fallon—she was my niece. I sent her to Paris. She was on the stage, just one night—I struck her—she fell on a chair—her back. She's dead now.

He gazed vaguely out into the gathering darkness.

Then he seemed to remember me.

There was a French Count he began, but his voice sank into silence.

I sat as if I had been turned to stone.