“I love you,” she cried, again and again and again, with such an anguish of sincerity as would convince the most skeptical spook that ever revisited the glimpses of the moon.
“You will forget again,” he said.
“I shall never forget!” she cried. “My life will henceforth be one continual remembrance of you, one long act of devotion to your memory, one oblation, one unceasing penitence, one agony of waiting!”
He lifted her face, and saw that it was true.
“Well,” said he, gracefully wrapping his cloak about him, “well, now I shall have a little peace.”
He kissed her, with a certain jaunty grace, upon her hair, and prepared to dissolve, while he lightly tapped a tattoo upon his leg with the dove-colored gloves he carried.
“Good-by, my dear!” he said; “henceforth I shall sleep o' nights; my heart is quite at rest.”
“But mine is breaking,” she wailed, madly trying once more to clasp his vanishing form.
He threw her a kiss from his misty finger-tips, and all that remained with her, besides her broken heart, was a faint disturbance of the air.