“And so,” quoth Peter, “when the two met again, he had a story to tell her.”  
“Oh!” queried Anne, toying with her fan, the flimsy thing of mother-of-pearl and cobwebby old lace. “A long story?”
 
“That,” ventured Peter with temerity, “depended largely—I might say altogether—on his listener.”
 
They were sitting, these two, in a wide window-seat at the end of a passage. They had the full length of it before them. It was a post of vantage. With what generalship Peter had marked it out, with what fine diplomacy he had found Lady Anne and escorted her hither, is no doubt better imagined than recorded. It suffices to chronicle that here they were, in an alcove of soft draperies and shaded lights, listening—if they chose—to the strains of music, watching—if they chose—the brilliant kaleidoscopic effect of colour through the open door of the great ballroom.
 
“My story,” continued Peter, “is of a Wanderer, one whom Fate in one of her freakish moods had wedded to the roads, the highways and hedges, the fields and woods.”
 
“Had he,” queried Anne, “nothing to solace him in his wanderings—no thoughts, no memories?”
 
“None,” said Peter steadily. “Once long ago Cupid had touched him with his wing—the merest flick of a feather. The man—poor fool!—fancied himself wounded, thought to bear a scar. Later, when he looked for it, he found there was none. It had been the most entire illusion on his part. And so he wandered the roads, regretting perhaps that he was scathless. But that is beside the mark.” He paused, glancing at the hands which held the flimsy cobwebby fan.
 
“One day,” continued Peter, “into his lonely wanderings came a letter, a mere scrap of bluish paper with tracings thereon of black ink. A flimsy fragile thing you might say, but to him it meant—well, everything. I fancy he had never realized his entire loneliness till that delicate herald of joy appeared. And—here was the wonder of it—it was written by a woman.”
 
“Oh!” said Lady Anne, the little pulses fluttering in her throat.
 
“It was,” went on Peter, “a gracious letter, a charming letter, written by one who had guessed at his loneliness of spirit, and thought to cheer that loneliness, to heal the wound she fancied him to bear. To him it came as a draught of water to one in a waterless desert. It brought him help, refreshment. He began to dream a dream of the writer, to imagine her near him. He spent hours in the company of his Dream Lady. He was no longer lonely, no longer desolate. In spirit—in fancy, if you will—she was ever with him. Oh, he knew well enough that he could never meet her in the flesh, that was part of the compact. But disembodied though she was, she meant more to him than all the material friendships in creation.” Again he stopped, his heart was beating fast.
 
“And then?” questioned Lady Anne.
 
He drew a deep breath. “And then Fate played a trick—a curious, almost incredible trick, Fate threw the woman in his path. Their meeting was strange, picturesque—I might almost call it unique. At the moment reason did not tell him the woman was the writer of the letters, but his soul, I believe, guessed. And presently he knew without a doubt his soul was right.”
 
“Ah!” breathed Lady Anne. “He knew the writer of the letters to him, but she did not know who answered them.”
 
“She did not,” echoed Peter.
 
There was a little pause.
 
“Then,&r............