OF GEMS AND PEBBLES How I sought her, how I found her, that fine house of hers with the lawn round it and the river by it, the stare of her lackeys, the pomp of her living, the great lord who was bowed out as I went in, the maid who bridled and glanced and laughed--they are all there in my memory, but blurred, confused, beyond clear recall.

Yet all that she was, looked, said, aye, or left the clearer for being unsaid, is graven on my memory in lines that no years obliterate and no change of mind makes hard to read.

She wore the great diamond necklace whose purchase was a fresh text with the serious, and a new jest for the wits; on her neck it gleamed and flashed as brilliantly and variously as the dazzling turns in her talk and the unending chase of fleeting moods across her face.
Yet I started from my lodging, sworn to win her, and came home sworn to have done with her.

Let me tell it; I told it to myself a thousand times in the days that followed.

But even now, and for all the times that the scene has played itself again before my unwilling eyes, I can scarcely tell whence and how at the last, the change came.