When the Birds Fly South by Stanton A. Coblentz

For more than five weeks I lay on my sick-bed, at first close to death, then slowly convalescing. After my rescue and temporary revival, a raging fever had attacked me; and I have little recollection of what followed, except that it was a nightmare of blurred impressions. Among my jumbled memories of those days when I lay balanced on the borderline, there is only one image that stands forth distinctly: the picture of a great pair of smoldering brown eyes surmounted by auburn curls and ringlets. Curiously enough, that picture became associated in my mind with visions of paradise. At times, for rare brief snatches, it seemed as if I were surrounded by that heaven in which I had long lost faith, and as if the possessor of the brown eyes were a ministering angel. Around her there seemed to be a light, as of some celestial presence; and when she went away she left only darkness and vacancy. Other forms there were, of course, other forms ceaselessly coming and going, coming and going, moving on tiptoe, silent or whispering like conspirators. But these were mere shadows in a void, grotesque or cloudy thin or unreal, the monstrous creatures of a world I had almost ceased to inhabit.

Perhaps it would have been well if I had indeed ceased to inhabit this world. Certainly, it would have been well for one whose tragic eyes come before me even now, haunting me like a ghost and looking reproach at every line I write. But that is to anticipate; destiny works in circuitous ways; and I, the stranger in the Vale of Sobul, could not have known that my arrival was to weave a fatal spell over her whom of all the world I should least have wished to injure.