Robin acquiesced, and as soon as he was gone began gathering driftwood. When she had quite a little heap she made a fire with the coals they carried in the pot. It is doubtless more romantic to build a fire by striking flint rocks together, but a pot of coals has its uses in a matchless universe. Then she found a long, stout club, and put one end in the fire, where it smouldered sullenly.

"There now," she said conclusively, "if my bear acquaintance calls, I will present him with 'the red flower.' I didn't learn the 'Jungle Books' by heart for nothing."

Meanwhile Adam was striding over the beach at a rate that brought him to the little cove and the high wall of rocks that shut them in on the south in a little over an hour. Two of the pups had gone with him, and they raced on ahead, as he came in sight of the house. Everything seemed to have an air of welcome, and the horses whinnied joyfully when he called them from the gateway.

The pathetic placard was still there, and he crumpled it in his hand, and went in and opened the windows. He milked one of the cows, and gathering some green stuff in the garden started back with the team and the sleds. Once down the steep decline, and over the rocks at the south, they went on rapidly.

Although he had wasted no time, it was past one o'clock when he saw her familiar figure afar off. She hurried to meet him. They had not been separated so long before that year, and realized the unconscious strain in the sudden revulsion. They said nothing of this, however, though they clasped hands for a moment. Then Robin spoke to the horses, and stroked their necks, as they bent their heads and rubbed against her affectionately.

She had spread their table on a broad, flat rock, but before they had their own meal, she warmed some of the milk, and they gave the kids their first lesson in drinking out of a bucket. Afterward it took but a few moments to strike camp. The burros were already packed, and the goat with her kids, all hobbled, were placed in the sled, and the cavalcade started on its way.



X

Cling to thy home! If there the meanest shed Yield thee a hearth and a shelter for thy head, And some poor plot, with vegetables stored, Be all that Heaven allots thee for thy board, Unsavory bread, and herbs that scatter'd grow Wild on the river-brink, or mountain-brow; Yet e'en this cheerless mansion shall provide More heart's repose than all the world beside.

LEONIDAS.

"Do you know, Adam," said Robin, when they had walked a mile in silence, "do you know that you are a fraud?"

"Well, yes," he responded, "but I didn't know you knew it. Is the discovery recent?"

"Never mind about dates, but tell me why you didn't use the rifle instead of the lariat? What did you take it for?"

"I took it for your peace of mind. I didn't use it for several good and substantial and sentimental reasons. To reverse them, this last year I have grown to understand your horror of killing things. We have done very well without sacrificing any of our dependents; in fact, it would seem like murder to slaughter the animals about us. And it's such a little world it seems a pity to kill off any of its inhabitants. To tell the truth, I hope the bear got away all right. This is maudlin, I know, but I don't want my hand first to bring death on all there is left of earth. Incidentally,—there are no cartridges."

He stopped the horses, while Robin readjusted the kids to make them more comfortable, and took the lame one in her arms, then they moved on.

Presently she said, "I am so glad of these kids!"

There was so much enthusiasm in her voice that Adam laughed and asked why, and she answered:—

"Like you, I have sound and sentimental reasons. The sound one is that we shall need their fleece unless,—why, goodness gracious, Adam, there is a baking-powder can of flax in the dresser, and I never thought till this moment that we can plant it."

"True," answered Adam, "but given flax or fleece, what would you do with it?"

"Spin it," she answered sententiously. "Of course you think I can't, but it happens that I once lived, when I was a little girl, very near to an old woman. I don't refer to her age, but her ideas. She carded and spun and wove and dyed all the family clothing. She made her own soap and wouldn't have a stove in the house. She had eight children, too, and they all of them turned out badly. I used to go there off and on; I think she looked on me as a kind of sinful amusement. Anyhow, she told me the world was going to ruin, and the women were poor 'doless' creatures, who couldn't spin a hank of yarn, or gin a pound of cotton, or heel a sock. She shook her head over me when she found I couldn't knit, but she set a garter for me at once, and during the seven or eight years that I went by her door on my way to school she taught me all those marvelous accomplishments. I daresay I have forgotten them."

"What are the sentimental reasons?" asked Adam.

She looked at the kid as it nestled against her shoulder.

"I have a fancy," she said, "that Nannette and her children are going to minister to a mind diseased, and help pluck a rooted sorrow from the brain. The world was getting too healthy. Has it ever struck you that we have neither of us been sick for a day this year? I have had to mother the chickens, but there has been no suffering. I'm not glad to have pain come into the world, but it is good to be able to alleviate it. We will put Nannette in a sling till her leg has a chance to set, and by the time it is well she won't want to leave us. As for the kids, I expect they will be like the plague of frogs, and we shall find them in our beds and our ovens and our kneading troughs. Oh, Adam, there is the house! Doesn't it look dear and homey?"

She put the kid back on the sled, and ran on, pointing out this and that, the growth of the corn, the afternoon radiance, till they reached their doorway. Then there were a thousand things to do. First Nannette was made comfortable in the stable; then the chickens were summoned to a meal of yellow corn, and when Lassie drove the cows into the barnyard, each was congratulated in turn upon her calf, and those interesting, if wobbly, bovine infants were carefully inspected. After supper they sat down before the fire, very tired, but the nearest happy they had been in a year. The dogs were lying about them, and the thump, thump of first one tail and then another told the story of canine content, while the kittens walked over them impartially.

"What a strange thing human nature is!" Adam said. "The only thing needed to make our life perfect is that it shall not last. The moment, if that moment ever comes, when it is real no more, it will become ideal."

"I know," she said dreamily. "Things in the world used to be too good to be true. This must cease to be, to be good at all."



XI

Yet if Hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none. Is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.

POE.

"It is the first of May," said Adam. "It is a year ago to-day. Shall we pass the gateway?"

"Not now," answered Robin. "Wait till afternoon. I am so busy this morning."

She was sitting at the table teaching half a dozen little chickens to appreciate hard-boiled egg. The wounded kid was lying in her lap, one arm was about it, and an adventurous kitten looked over her shoulder. As she tapped on the board with one slender forefinger, the chickens, hearing their mother's bill, began picking up the fragments of egg. She had rounded out wonderfully in a year, and Adam realized for the first time that she was a very beautiful woman.

"Suppose," she went on, "you begin your book to-day. Write your description of a year ago. It will never be so plain again. There is plenty of time before we go. Besides, if it is a dream, we shall want the written record to show what dreams may come."

Adam hesitated a moment, then went to his desk. She had said truly, the events of that day would never again be so clear, and as he began to record them they marshaled themselves before him, until he found himself writing with a dramatic power that fascinated and amazed him.

It must have been some time afterward that Robin stole in and set a glass of milk, some biscuit and strawberries, down on the desk beside him and then went out, taking the dogs with her. He did not notice another sound until she called him to supper.

While he did the evening work Robin dressed herself in the garments she had worn the year before. As soon as she could make others she had put them aside, awaiting the awakening or the rescue.

The heavy cloth skirt and the silk waist were put on with a strange reluctance. Years ago the old doctor in "The Guardian Angel" said our china became our tombstones, but surely our garments may become the graveyards of our emotions, and hold sharp or sweet remembrances long after they are past wearing. In spite of some tan Robin found the face that looked back at her from her mirror infinitely more attractive than it had been the year before.

Adam started a little when he saw her. Then he drew her hand through his arm, and they went to the gateway. As he opened the gate she turned and looked back. The sun was behind the mountains, and the shadows were long and dark. They heard the sounds of the various creatures settling into quiet for the night, and Adam sent back all the dogs but Lassie. They went slowly and wistfully. Robin stooped and kissed Prince on his white forehead. As Adam closed the gate, she said half fearfully, "Shall we ever see them again?" But he did not answer. He took her hand and led her to the boulder.

Far as the eye could reach they saw what they expected to see. Half a mile away the sea rolled in on a tolerably level beach; here it thundered and roared against a sheer cliff. Among the rocks they could see the nests of many wild-fowl, and gulls flew by them. They sat down on the rock and waited until midnight. Then they went home. The dogs received them obstreperously, and the kid from its corner bleated faintly. Robin bent over it anxiously, then warmed some milk and fed it. When Adam came in with some fresh water she was swinging slowly to and fro in the rocker, singing softly an absurd nursery song:—

"Sleep, baby, sleep. The stars they are the sheep; The big moon is the shepherdess; The little stars are the lambs, I guess. Sleep, baby, sleep."

"It needed to be cuddled," she said in as matter-of-fact a voice as if all lambs were sung to sleep regularly. "You know dear old Professor Carter said there would have been no wild animals if we hadn't made them so; but now, if you will, you can put her with Nannie."

When he came back she had gone into her room. There was nothing more for either of them to say. There was nothing to do, except to hope for a sail, since they no longer hoped for an awakening.



XII

Speech is but broken light upon the depth Of the unspoken.

GEORGE ELIOT.

The work on the book progressed rather slowly. Often Adam had to refer to Robin when his memory was at fault. At first she had gone away, to leave him alone with his work, but as he referred to her more frequently, she sat with him, sewing while he wrote, a frame of morning-glories back of her, or reading with the keen enjoyment of one who renews a pleasure long foregone. When he seemed to be going on smoothly, she sometimes stole away and gave herself up to long hours with her violin.

One afternoon she tapped on his casement. His work was lagging, and he rose gladly and went out with her. They walked up the path and through the gateway to their boulder, and sat down.

"Talk to me," said Adam.

She shook her head. "About what, most worshipful seigneur? For I am but a worm of the dust before thee, and all my tales are of the homely tasks of baking and brewing. Naught is there worthy to be set down in thy book." Then, with a sudden change of manner, "Oh, Adam, there are eighteen new chickens to-day! The Plymouth Rock hen stole a nest, and they came off this morning. And there is some news too. The flax is in bloom. It is so pretty."

"When do you expect to weave your first linen?" asked Adam.

"Oh, I don't know, but it is good to know there will be some to weave. Do you remember Andersen's story of the flax? I was thinking of it this morning as I pulled out some weeds, and how when it was pulled up and cut and hackled, it said: 'One cannot always have good times. One must make one's experience, and so one comes to know something;' and when it is woven and cut up and made into garments, it still says, 'If I have suffered something, I have been made into something. I am happiest of all. That is a real blessing. Now I shall be of some use in the world, and that is right, that is a true pleasure.'"

"If one only knew he was to be of some use," Adam said wearily; "if we could see the justification of our suffering."

"Then we should be as gods," answered Robin. "I like the song of the flax, 'content, content;' and when the linen is worn out, it is again tortured and beaten until it becomes paper whereon an eternal word is written. I used to wonder why Andersen was given to children; not that I wouldn't have them read him, but he is one of the profound thinkers of the world. No one had Andersen clubs, or professed to find deep and wonderful esoteric truths in his stories, but they are there. Do you remember my girls' club down on—I don't think there were any streets, but the inhabitants called the place 'Kerry Patch'?"

"Why, no," said Adam, "I didn't know you had one; why didn't you tell me?"

"That was ever so long ago, ages and ages,—when you came to see—" She paused a little, and then spoke the personal pronoun that tells the whole story, for a woman can say "him" in such a way as to betray unspeakable heights of adoration or abysses of loathing. She went on slowly. "You were not one of my friends then; how could you be, if there existed anything in common between you two? That sounds dreadful, but you know all about it so well that subterfuges are useless."

"To tell the truth, I never cared anything about him at all," Adam answered quickly. "Like a good many others, I was enthusiastic over your voice. He asked me to the house to hear you sing, and I went, and was glad of the chance. And you have never sung for me once this year."

"You never asked me," she answered. "'A dumb priest loses his benefice.' But I was speaking of my club. We studied Andersen all winter, and got enough more out of him than a lot of us who pored over Ibsen, guided by a literary expert. Andersen has a more beautiful, a more inspiring philosophy. Every nation has its story of Psyche, the lost soul of things, but none is more beautiful than the tale of Gerda and Kay. There were children in that club who were cruel, horribly cruel, and one day when we gave an entertainment for them, one of the older girls recited the story of 'The Daisy and the Lark.' They cried as I had cried over it years before."

"I remember," he said. "It broke my heart when I was a little shaver. I couldn't give so sad a story as that to a child."

"Oh, yes, you could," she said, "if the child needed it. The world was cruel, cruel, Adam; I used to wonder sometimes why God did not blot it all out, as He has blotted it out now. Once in another club, a big, swell affair, there was a Humane Society programme. One woman, in a Persian lamb jacket, spoke on the evils of the overcheck; you know how they get that wool? And women nodded the aigrettes in their bonnets, torn from the old birds while the little ones starved to death, to show their approval, and patted their hands gloved in the skins of kids, sewed in cloth soon after their birth so they couldn't grow a fleece, and tortured all their short lives, and went home to eat pate-de-foie gras, and broil live lobsters, thanking God they were not as the rest of men, if only they let out their check-reins a hole or so. It was horrible,—the cruelties men practised to gratify appetite, and that women were guilty of for vanity. I suppose I am a monomaniac on the subject, but we never seemed far removed from barbarians, when we went clothed in the skins of wild animals, and decorated with their heads and tails and feathers, like so many Sioux chiefs. The varnish of civilization isn't dry on us yet. Why, if a ship should come here now, do you know what they would do first, unless they happened to be East Indians? They would say they wanted some fresh meat, and offer to buy Lily; she is the fattest of the cows. If we wouldn't sell her, they would probably take her anyway."

"Kill Lily," cried Adam, angrily. "They'd have me to kill first; nothing on this place is going to be slaughtered while I can protect it." He went on more slowly, a little ashamed of his heat, "I feel a sense of kinship with all these creatures that would make it impossible to kill them. It's like the woman whose Newfoundland died, and a friend asked if she was going to have him stuffed. 'Stuffed!' she said; 'I'd as soon think of stuffing my husband!'"

Robin laughed, and leaning over tweaked Lassie's ear. "If we are to be stuffed, we prefer to have it an ante-mortem performance, don't we, little dog?"

The sun dropped behind the tall peaks, but its dying light still covered sea and shore. They rose as if for the benediction, and looked out at the waters before them. Then they looked at each other and grew white to the lips, and Robin knelt down and flinging her arms around Lassie sobbed and laughed. Adam never took his eyes from the coming ship.



XIII

Every ship brings a word; Well for those who have no fear, Looking seaward well assured That the word the vessel brings Is the word they wish to hear.

EMERSON.

The ship bore steadily toward them, but night was coming on so rapidly that her lines were obscured. They could not even tell whether it was a sailing vessel or propelled by steam.

"There's one thing certain," said Adam, excitedly: "it was coming this way, but very slowly. I suppose that is to be expected of a ship sailing unknown waters. They have nothing to go by, though they know, of course, just what part of the round globe they are on."

She answered almost apathetically, as if she found it difficult to talk, "It seems as if good sailors would lay by at night, when they do not know their course, and there is land in sight,—land that has never been explored."

"It does seem strange she should come right on," he assented. "For surely no ship has ever sailed these seas before. Perhaps—"

"Perhaps what?"

"Perhaps she has been clear around; perhaps this is the only bit of land left above a world ocean."

Robin shivered a little, and Adam turned toward the beacon, that had glowed in vain for a year. It had been built on a high, altar-shaped rock, across the gorge, where it could be kept up without leaving the park. Robin went with him, and they gathered a pile of timber that insured the brilliancy of their signal until morning. Adam piled on the logs till the blaze leaped far up in the darkness; then they went back to the boulder and sat down to think and wait.

"See how the wind is rising," said Robin, breaking a silence of an hour, during which even Lassie had been motionless.

"But it is toward land," answered Adam.

"But the same wind that brings us the ship may dash it to pieces on this awful coast."

"True, but she is far enough out to make herself secure. Oh, Robin, suppose she sails around us and goes on!"

"That is impossible," answered Robin. "The people on that ship are as anxious to find us as we can be to see them, if they are civilized at all. Noah and Mt. Ararat are not to be named in the same day with us."

Adam crossed the gorge and added fuel to the fire. For a time the wind increased in velocity until a stiff gale was blowing, then, as the small hours came on, it waned, and the beacon flared straight up once more.

"I wonder where's she from?" said Adam.

"I wonder where she is now," answered Robin.

"I feel sure," he said, "when morning comes we shall see her riding the waves out there; and think of it, Robin, we can go!"

Robin made no reply, and her very silence made Adam repeat, but as a self-addressed question, "Go where? Yes," he went on quickly, "go where, Robin. Suppose the ship is all right, and that she stops, and the crew are not pirates, and are willing to take us aboard, where are we to go? Is there any place on earth that can mean as much to us as this island? Suppose Asia, or Africa, or Europe are still in existence, we should not regain our friends and relatives, and life would be harder with strange people, under a strange government, far more so than we have found it here, even without so many of its luxuries."

Robin shook her head sadly. "At first, Adam. We should learn their language and their customs. New friends are speedily acquired, and as for relatives,—well, in the scheme of life relatives don't count for much. There always comes a time when they step out of our lives, anyway."

"But as to happiness?"

Her face paled a little. "Have you been happy here?" she asked, without raising her eyes to his, and then went on, not waiting for a reply, "If you have been, it has been in the care of our little family of dependents, who do not need you half so much as the great family of human dependents. Rest assured if there is a continent over there across the darkness, it is peopled with beings who need the devoted and unselfish labors of such a man as you. You would find your work easily enough,—the work you have been saved for, the work you must do."

"But if there is no continent left?" he queried.

"In that case there must be islands; there were many mountains higher than these, and they are peopled, no doubt. Shall we not go to these other orphans, deserted by Mother Earth, our brothers and sisters, through our common calamity?"

Both were silent, engrossed in their own thoughts. A return to the world meant going back to the uncivilized rush of civilization. It meant the eternal question of what shall we eat, and what shall we drink, and where-withal shall we be clothed? It meant the old competition, the stern old law of the survival of the brawniest. Above all, to Robin, it meant separation from Adam, for once more in Rome, the customs of Rome must be followed. To do Adam justice, this was a contingency which did not enter his mind. As he had said before, whatever had put them in this dream together would keep them there, so that when he thought of relinquishing all the comfort and ease and quiet of his present life, all the loving animals, the cosy little house, the tiny fields, the blooming garden, it never occurred to him that he must relinquish more than all these things, more than the peace and harmony, that which, unconsciously, had come to be the very guiding star of his life.

"I wonder if whoever is left cares for grand opera?" said Robin, rather grimly.

"Why?" asked Adam in so startled a voice that she laughed hysterically.

"It's the only thing I know well enough to make a living at it," she said laconically. "I think the fire needs some more wood, Adam."

As he replenished it, her words burned themselves upon his brain, and he realized in an instant that a return to the old world meant giving up this supreme friend, all that he had left in the world, all there was for him in any world. The thing was impossible. He turned to go back to her, some kind of an impetuous avowal on his lips, but she had left the boulder and walked down almost to the edge of a precipitous cliff which they had called "Lover's Leap," in a spirit of badinage. She stood there quietly, watching the gray dawn, and his heart impelled him to go to her and take her in his arms. As his love revealed itself to him in all its power, it seemed impossible that he should know it now for the first time. Why, why, had he been so blind? If the ship took them away—

He walked unsteadily down to her, resolved to say nothing. If she wanted to go, her wish should be sufficient.

The dawn came slowly, but it came at last. As the darkness lifted, a slight fog settled over the face of the waters. Instinctively they recalled that other night when they had watched through the mist and his hand closed over hers. The sun was well up before the east wind dissipated it, and left only the dancing waves, brilliantly blue, stretching away into the dawn. On all that broad expanse there was not so much as a cockle-shell afloat.

Robin turned and looked to right and left in bewilderment, and then at Adam.

His chest was heaving, and as his eyes searched her face he cried, "Thank God," and gathered her up in his arms. She nestled there without a word.

They crossed the gorge and scattered the brands of their watch-fire, and walked on down to the cove. Suddenly Lassie came bounding toward them uttering short, excited barks. They quickened their pace, and as they came in sight of the beach discovered the object of her alarm. Against a small promontory, lying on one side, was the ship they had sighted the evening before. It was a hopeless wreck, and had borne to them no living thing. Yet it had served its purpose. It had revealed their love for each other, and told them that they had hoped against a second deluge in vain.



XIV

The truth of truths is love.

BAILEY.

As Adam went about his morning's work he was filled with a sense of gladness, an exaltation of life he had never known before. He stretched out his arms, as if to let all the glory of the earth meet the profounder splendor of his soul. As he walked down the garden path he looked with affection at the flowers they had planted together. But for the absurdity of it, he could have woven a chaplet of them and worn it. But the world had reached that height of civilization where the symbol of the glad and living thing was too emotional; always and everywhere we preferred the dead thing, the skin of the seal, the shroud of the silkworm, the straw that was left after the flowers were gone; and Adam was still civilized.

He accepted his happiness without a question. It was too real, too keen, too great a revelation for him to stop to analyze it. He knew it in every pulsation of his heart, in every imagination of his mind, and with the quickened senses of the lover he perceived that Robin's feelings differed from his own. For a year he had been lost in introspection; now they seemed to have changed places, and she grew silent and almost reserved.

"What is it, dear?" he said. "No, don't try to evade an answer. We must not stop being frank with each other now."

She did not reply at once, and when she did her voice was so low that he had to stoop to catch the words. "Do you think you do love me as fully as you might have loved some one else, younger and happier than I, better fitted to you? It doesn't seem as if you could; you never did in the old days, you never even thought of it."

Adam laughed lightly. "I beg of you spare me, for this isn't 'so sudden' at all." Then seeing that her mood forbade jest, he went on seriously: "Really, I mean it. It's true I never made you pretty speeches in the old days, nor stopped to consider whether I might have done so had things been different; but then I never made pretty speeches to any one. From the very beginning I have taken you as a matter of course. It always seemed as if we had known each other from the very first. You entered into my plans as if you had known them as you might if we had gone to the same little red schoolhouse. I wish we had! I'm jealous of the years when I didn't know you."

"But a whole year," she said doubtfully. "Are you sure it isn't just loneliness and propinquity?"

Adam kissed her fingers one at a time. "You are going to beg my pardon for that some day," he said. "You are not very vain, my sweetheart; how could I help loving you?"

"That's just what I am finding fault with," she said with a sudden twinkle of fun in her eyes. "You have managed to keep from it so long. But seriously, I am not the kind of a woman I should have fancied you would care for. I am, at least I was, very weary of life; I knew too much about it. And I am older than you."

He looked at her critically. "You were, a year ago," he answered; "I don't know how much, two or three years—"

"Five," she said.

"Well, five; but this last year you have been growing young. The very fact that you were tired of the old life made it less of a strain for you to give it up. The tired look is all gone, even from your eyes, whereas lots of gray has come into my hair. You had learned to live in yourself and your music. My whole scheme of life was wrapped up in the social existence of our time. In a way I lost more than you did. I have learned a good deal this past year. Five years ago, if I had loved you, there would have been many inequalities between us that do not exist to-day. Now it seems to me we are as absolutely mated, as much parts of one whole as the two halves of the brain, or the right and left ventricles of our hearts. It is no disparagement of you or of myself to say that no boy could appreciate you. The measure of a man's manhood is his ability to understand the highest type of womanhood. As to your being worldly, that's all nonsense." He stroked her hair a few minutes in silence, and then said, half quizzically, "You might question me, if I said it, but this is what Balzac said of women like you: 'A woman who has received a man's education possesses a faculty which is the most fertile in happiness for herself and her husband; but that woman is as rare as happiness itself.'"

She looked pleased, but she did not reply, and he went on.

"Do you still doubt me? Well, then, know that I have loved you from the very beginning, for love, when it comes, is a retroactive law of our being. If I had loved you less, if you had seemed less a part of me, I might have realized it sooner."

She shook her head. "I have known that I loved you for a long time, months," she said.

"Then you ought to have known I loved you," he answered quickly. "Don't you think it is possible to love with our souls, our subconsciousness, and realize with our slow brains, after months and years, what our hearts knew at once? Even love has become more or less of a mental process. We reason about things instead of feeling them, and yet when we come to our last analyses we don't know anything; we simply feel. When the scientist says, 'The amoeba moves out of the shade into the sunlight because it wants the sunlight,' he bases his postulate upon what he feels, and believes that the atom feels. This is all that he knows. We do not seek warmth because we have calculated its effects upon us, but because we feel cold. Oh, we have starved our feelings to feed our brains, until the mind believes it is the immortal part of us, instead of realizing that what we know, we are merely re-discovering, while what we feel is our apperception of the infinite. If we had the courage to be true to our feelings, instead of our thoughts, I believe it would be a better, as it would certainly be a truer, world."

"Do you really think more people are guided by thought than by feeling?" she asked with a good deal of surprise.

"Perhaps not in one sense," he answered. "A great many people are carried along by their impulses, their transitory emotions, which are not, properly speaking, feelings at all. They make what some one calls the 'fatal error of mistaking the eddy for the current.' But among educated people it seems to me that we think too much, especially of our own thoughts, and feel too little. All this year I have not said that I loved you; I don't know that I have thought it, but I have felt and lived it. Sometimes I have not been thoughtful—"

"You have always been too thoughtful," she interrupted.

"No, but when I have been inconsiderate it was because you were myself, the best self that we overlook sometimes, but return to with unfailing loyalty. You were not bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh; that is a very low and material view of what you have been and are to me, heart of my heart and soul of my soul. I cannot think of a life apart from you, for you are my life. Marriage is not a matter of a license and a ceremony and Mendelssohn and gaping crowds and a tour. We do not need any one to tell us that what God has joined cannot be sundered by man. All this year has been a long wedding of every thought and feeling and desire, until I have looked into your eyes to see my own wish. We have thought and thought, but that way madness lies. Now I feel that all the world we have lost, lives for us in every glorious possibility in each other. For I know that you love me."

"Yes," she said, "I think I have loved you all along, but it never entered my dreams that you could love me. Even now, when you tell me, it does not seem as if it could be so, either by the mental process, or by that of feeling."

He caught her in his arms and kissed her, a kiss so long and tender that it left her clinging to him, breathless and half awakened.

"Don't think," he said, "feel,—feel my heart and know that every beat is for you, that every atom of me calls for you, and every drop of blood obeys, as it would command you. I have tried to reach the ideal of the love that says, not 'thou must be mine,' but 'I must be thine,' but I have failed if you can doubt me."

She flung her arms around his neck with sudden passion.

"This is the greatest, the most perfect dream of all," she said; "I think it must be heaven."

"A new heaven and a new earth," he answered gently.



XV

Women alone know how much attraction there is in the respect which a master shows them.

BALZAC.

The derelict did not afford them much amusement or information. The waves soon beat her to pieces on the savage rocks. Apparently she had been a ship plying between Western ports, probably San Francisco and Honolulu. In the wreckage washed up there were a few pounds of rice, and some brooms of what they believed to be sugar-cane. There was nothing else.

"Not even a lemon!" Robin said disconsolately. "Think of living all one's natural life not only ten, but ten thousand miles from a lemon."

Adam laughed sympathetically. "It's like a yachting party I remember; we found that the boat we had engaged had been taken by somebody else, and our set had to be divided. Later in the evening we discovered that we had all the sugar and the other crowd all the lemons. ''Twas ever thus from childhood's hour, I've seen my fondest hopes decay: I never wanted something sour, but what molasses came my way.' Never mind, dear. We will go and plant our sugar, and by the time it is ready to sweeten anything, a whole cargo of lemons may have floated into harbor right at our door."

They crossed the ranges to the western coast, where there was lower ground, better fitted to the supposed requirements of rice and cane, and had a good deal of amusement out of their ignorance, neither of them having more than a misty idea about either rice or sugar before they reach the stage to be served together.

It was quite late when they were through and camped for supper. Remembering their trip of a few weeks previous, that now seemed so long ago, Adam said, "Are you too tired to sing, dear? It is so long since I have heard you."

She stood up and thought for a moment, and then putting back her loosened hair began with Bourdillon's "The night has a thousand eyes," and sang on and on. At last, turning to Adam with a little fond gesture, and altering the words slightly, she sang:

"Like a laverlock in the lift, sing, O bonny bride! All the world was Adam once, with Eve by his side. What's the world, my lad, my love? What can it do? I am thine, and thou art mine; life is sweet and new. If the world have missed the mark, let it stand by, For we two have gotten leave, and once more we'll try."

"'Once more,'" Adam repeated. "Once more, my darling! Oh, life is sweet and new for us; we can afford to lose the world! When will you come to me, love, when?"

She shook her head with a little wilful laugh, and all the glistening glory of her hair fell about her like a wedding veil.

"Wait," she said; "wait a little. The flax is not nearly ready for spinning yet; can a bride forget her attire? Besides, how can we be—" she paused, and let her silence fill the gap, "when I know we neither of us know any ceremony more dignified than hopping over a broomstick?"

They started homeward, walking slowly through the dimly lighted mountain gorges, talking the ineffable nonsense that lovers never weary of. As they came to a brook that rushed noisily down the ravine, Adam stepped across, and held out his hand to her.

"Wait a moment," he said, "just where you are, dear, and say this with me:—

"'Over running water: my love I give to you, my life I pledge to you, my heart I take not back from you while this water runs.

"'Over running water: every seventh year, at this time of the year, at this hour of the night, I will meet you here to renew my troth; death alone to relieve me of this vow.'"

"Is that all?" she asked wonderingly. "Over running water, while this water runs, while there is any snow in the mountains, or rivers upon land, or waters in the seas, or clouds in the skies, when the world is old, and the sun burned out, and time grows weary, I shall love you still, always and forever. What is it all about, love?" He clasped her close, and did not answer at once. "Don't you know that old Irish troth," he said, "which would have been enough, even in that hard, unromantic world of ours, to have made you legally my wife, if said over any Scottish stream? I thought you knew; you are sure I would not trick you? You know I could not?" He put her head back on his shoulder and looked into her shining eyes. It seemed to him he could not bear even a look of reproach. She raised her hands almost as if she were placing an invisible crown upon his head, and let her arms fall about his shoulders.

"Then I am your wife while living water runs?"

"Forever and forever," he replied.

"Oh, wait, wait just a little," she answered.



XVI

All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust, and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great Master, Author, and Founder of society.

BURKE.

Adam found a note beside his plate in the morning. "I will be back before five o'clock," it said; "I must think." He did not sit down to the table she had spread for him, but called the dogs; Prince was missing, and this was a relief to him. Nothing could happen to her when Prince was with her. His first impulse was to follow her, but he repelled it, and he too sat down to think. Lassie whined uneasily, and he stroked her head absent-mindedly, and finally went out and tried to work. The hours dragged away, and by four o'clock he could stand it no longer. He went to the gateway. As he unfastened it, he saw her coming toward him, but she stopped and he joined her, and together they turned back to the boulder. He noticed that she was very white, and that her eyes looked as if she had not slept, but he only said, "Have you thought?"

"Yes," she answered, "I have thought."

"And decided?"

"No," she said wearily; "we must decide together. We are not children, Adam, nor are we in any way the prototypes of those first parents of ours. I think sometimes that ever since their day their children have been walking in a blind circle, eating not the fruit of knowledge, but of the knowledge of good and evil. And what do we know, you and I, after all these years? Are you sure what we ought to do? It is as if God had taken us into a conspiracy to renew the old, or create a new, scheme of existence. Possibly we are being tried, tested, to prove whether or not we have learned our lesson. We must be brave enough to think, not what is our will, but what is our duty. Think of the awful responsibility, whichever way we choose."

"I can't," said Adam. "I can't think of anything but you."

"Nor I of aught but you," she said, moving away, "when you hold me so. But we must think."

"I have," answered Adam, gravely. "All my life I have thought. I have wanted the perfect companionship of the one woman in all the world who could give it; I have always known she would come. I have wanted a home; I have wanted to see my sons and daughters grow up about me. I wanted to be a power for good in this world of which we are a part, and where we live for some good purpose, if there be any purpose in life. I have so conducted myself that I can look a good woman in the face, and offer her my life, for whatever it is worth, without damning recollections to come between us. My children will have a clean heritage of blood and name. The family tree was scoffed at in America, but, thank God, mine was an oak that had weathered many a gale. Not very great folk, but honest, upright, fearless men and women, true to their king or their country and their faiths; true to their ideals, too, when their fellows were content with realities only. Any man who gives his children such a heritage as that can say with more truth than Napoleon said to his soldiers, 'Fifty centuries look down upon you.' I wanted to make the world a little better for my life, and I wanted my children brought up to feel that their lives belonged first to their country, to live or die for her."

"I know," said Robin, softly; "I used to think I would drape the flag over my baby's cradle, and embroider it on his pinning blanket."

"We are probably a pair of sentimental fools," he went on, "but I believe in sentiment. A man could not say this out loud because sentiment was supposed to be essentially womanish. How those old distinctions weary one, with their scientific data to prove that men surpass women in the senses of feeling and taste, while women have better sight and hearing, and so on through every conceivable maundering of the human brain, forever harping on differences and accentuating them, forever dwelling on sex distinctions and never on a common humanity."

"It was a dreadfully scientific age," she assented, "a generation fearfully and wonderfully given over to statistics; and yet how many dreamers there were!"

"Yes, but in the twentieth century a young man dreamed dreams and saw visions at his own risk. While he dreamed of the brotherhood of man, his classmate with the corporation practice distanced him in the pursuit of position. While he led himself through the valley of the shadow of temptation, and feared no evil because of the Madonna vision in his soul, even the Madonnas preferred Lancelot and Tristram to Galahad. It wasn't an easy world for a man who wanted to keep faith with himself. It was a pinchbeck world, of pretence and pull,—that world that lies drowned out there. And yet I believe it was infinitely better than the lost Atlantis, better than the deluged planet of Noah, nobler and finer than the best civilization of which we have any trace. I never despaired of it, and yet as I grew older I wondered if I was not foolish and mistaken in daring to hope and to dream."

"I know," she said again. "I think I did despair, for it seemed to me a dreadful, a terrible world. I used to wonder how conscientious men and women could bring other human beings into it, to be and to suffer and to faint in the frantic struggle for the unrealities that made us miserable or happy. Consider how paltry they were. If we built a new house, we were infinitely more concerned to see that the contractor used pressed brick than we were to see that the construction of our own characters was true. When we grew wealthy we moved into houses of more stories; but how often did we say: 'Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul'? I had as clean and strong a heritage as you, but a different one. It is no use to comfort oneself with nice little aphorisms about the needle's eye, and saws about filthy lucre, and telling God's estimate of money from the kind of people He gives it to; I tell you biting poverty is a terrible thing, an unspeakable thing. It is a misfortune for a child to grow up under a sense of injustice. I used to have times of revolt against it all, when I hated with the blind, ferocious hate of a child, and I saw what David never saw,—the righteous forsaken, and his seed begging, not bread, but a chance to earn his bread, and begging for it without being able to make just terms. I saw my home sold under the sheriff's hammer, and my parents struggle all their lives because of the lack of money, when they had everything else, nobility, character, truth, and education. My girlhood was a long series of going-withouts. Finally I married a man who promised me everything. Ah, well, when has the Apple of Sodom failed to deceive the eye and undeceive the tongue? At least he did care for my voice, and through that I learned that all those years I had carried in my own throat the golden notes to have altered everything, and I sang a little gladness into my parents' lives before they ended, thank God."

"How did you come to sing in opera? Do not tell me if the recollection is unpleasant. I wondered then."

"Because after—after things went wrong, I could not take his money. I knew how to sing, and I loved it; but even there it was the same story of suspicion and jealousy, till it seemed to me that hate and fear ruled the world. I went to so many, many cities, but there was no city beautiful, and in all the country I found no Arcady. I had money then, it is true; but the jingle of the guinea doesn't help the artist who sings, or paints, or writes, or plays, because God has put it into his soul to do this thing; at least not after the very first, when it stands as a tangible assurance of success. The cities were 'cities of dreadful night,' and awful days; there were places that were not hives, but styes of human beings, fighting for what they called life, to die, never having lived. Sometimes I went into those jungles of civilization and sang to them. It was the only thing I could give them all. It was there I got my lesson. I had been singing 'All Tears,' when an old woman said in her feeble, trembling voice, 'Ye mun loe us, young leddy, to come to sic a place an' sing o' Him wha sa loed the warld that He sent His only begotten Son ta it, for it's only great loe that casts out fear, and this is a fearsome spot.' Since then I haven't hated anything, except wanton cruelty, and I know love rules when it is fearless, but that is very seldom. We were afraid to say, I love you, to anything more sensitive than a stray kitten, though the world has hungered and thirsted after the love we have feared to give even to our own children. And yet just the love a man and woman may bear each other, unconsciously, is enough to transform the earth. We have not been cross to each other; I do not believe we have spoken unkindly to anything this year."

He drew her into his arms. "Is it enough to regenerate the earth?"

"And keep it regenerated?" she echoed. "Do you know?"

"Do you remember telling me, long ago, of a story in which the woman said she had never seen but one man whose mother she would be willing to be? And you said you felt so about me? I was very proud of it then, but I am prouder of it now, since, feeling so, you cannot be unwilling to be the mother of my children. You are not, are you?"

She nestled a little closer to him, and put her hand about his neck. He stooped and kissed it, and repeated his question.

"Unwilling? No; how could I be? I never dreaded maternity except when—and that lasted such a little while. I do not dread it now. It seems to me it would be a blessed thing for us. But, Adam, Adam, tell me, for I have sat here all day asking myself, whether it is a blessed thing to be born, or a penalty that others pay."

"I think it would be a blessing to be your son," he said steadily.

"And I think it would be a benediction to be yours," she answered; "but he would not be yours nor mine, but ours, plus everything in the past, verily heir of all the ages, and the ages were full of pain and sorrow. Oh," she said passionately, "could you and I who love him so, this son who is only our wish, could you and I who know the weight of this weary world, bind it upon the shoulders of our baby boy, and send him staggering down the centuries, the new Atlas of this old earth?"

They sat in silence for a long time. Then Adam said slowly, "I don't know, dearest; but I do know that you are tired and hungry, and I am going to take you home."

They rose and disappeared through the gateway together.



XVII

Love gives us a sort of religion of our own; we respect another life in ourselves.

BALZAC.

Robin was shelling peas. Adam was reading her the story of their deluge. He paused, dissatisfied, and said impatiently,—

"I have not described it at all. I have said all I had to say in less than a thousand words; one would think such a scene deserved a hundred thousand."

Robin smiled her little inscrutable smile. "I think you have done it very well. It isn't intended to be scientific. You haven't told all the strata that were turned skyward for a moment when that crevasse opened between us and the town. You will find, if you turn to the first chapter of Genesis, that there is very little detail; but I am sure that the one line, 'He made the stars also,' is as eloquent as a treatise on the nebular theory. If you were learned in geology and astronomy and so on, you would load it down with an avalanche of scientific hypotheses, about which you would really know nothing, except by deduction, and over which future scientists would wrangle, part of them making you a god, and the rest proving you a fool. Be content to 'climb where Moses stood,' and produce literature."

"'Why should an author fret about The judgment of posterity? It is not, and it never was, And it, perhaps, may never be,'"

quoted Adam, cynically. "I wonder what they will call us, Robin, and who will lecture on my mistakes in seven or eight thousand years, and show how it never could have happened. Do you suppose there is any one else on earth? Did the Atlantis people leave any literature behind them?"

Robin shook her head. "Who really knows? God has not left Himself without a witness, at any time. In some way the story of creation has gone on and on. Every nation has its Eden and flood and Saviour. Esther was the first, I think, to have her wish granted 'even to the half of my kingdom,' and all the fairy stories since have borrowed the phrase. Cinderella is almost as old as Job; and the Irish, the Fenians, claim that Cadmus, the Phoenician, was one of their forebears. Wide as race distinctions were, there were strange and almost unaccountable similarities."

She went indoors to see to her baking, and coming back went on with her work. Adam watched her silently for awhile, and then said curiously, "I wonder what you have missed most this year?"

"Pins and needles, and until Christmas, books and shoes and stockings and sugar and a cook-stove and a piano," answered Robin, promptly. "I can live without the opera and a telephone, but if you only knew how I cherish my stock of pins, and with what dread I look forward to the day when, like a poor white trash family I used to know, I shall refer to the needle. I used to think you could do anything with a pair of pliers and a bit of wire, but I tremble lest you may not be able to compass a needle." She looked up, and seeing Adam's troubled face said quickly, "Forgive me for being frivolous; I am so happy, I can't help it. What were you thinking of, Adam?"

He got up and walked away a few yards, and cut one of the long thick yucca leaves, and stripped it down to the central spine, while he went on speaking to her. "I was thinking," he said, "of what Mill said about inventions, and how they hadn't helped the laboring man; that they had neither decreased his number of working hours, nor increased his comforts, and wondering whether it would be better for a new race to find an electric light plant alongside their other plants, or whether they would better work out their own salvation, a little at a time, by main strength and awkwardness. I was thinking how strange our books would seem to men and women who knew nothing of the—the late earth." He held out to her what looked something like a needle threaded with coarse white linen thread. "Will your Majesty deign to look at this?"

She took it, and looked at it wonderingly, and then ran in and brought back a torn towel, and began mending it. "Why, it sews very well," she said; "who taught you that?"

"The mother of inventions generally," he answered. "If you ever had gone on the round-up, you might have had occasion for a needle and thread when there wasn't any nearer than a hundred miles. But you haven't answered my question."

"About inventions and so on? It seems to me you have to consider the raison d'etre of a people before you can tell the answer. What is the use of labor-saving inventions, if the time saved isn't of some great value? What is to be the chief end of man in a dispensation that has no catechism as a guide-post?"

"A very different end from the old one," answered Adam, half sternly. "Work should not come to him as a curse, nor as his greatest boon; at least, not hard, manual labor. There should be work enough to insure ease and comfort, and every one should work freely and gladly. I should educate the individual; he should be strong of body and keen of mind, and should feel that his talents were given him for use, not for concealment; he should use his hands, both of them, and find delight in their work. It is a beautiful world, it always was, but I don't know that the steam-engine brought men's souls closer together, or that the electric light let in any more radiance upon our minds, or that the great telescopes made heaven any nearer. It should be a happier and a healthier world, if it was no more."

"Adam," she said abruptly, "if we had children, in what religious faith would you bring them up?"

"I don't know; I never thought about it very much," he answered honestly. "I have an ideal in my mind, but I can't explain it. I believe in one source of life, and therefore a common divinity."

Robin laughed quietly. "That is like the Hindoo proverb, 'That which exists is one; sages call it variously.' That has been called pantheism, and for that belief the Jews expelled Baruch Benedict Spinoza from their synagogue. In our time there was a very learned magazine published in its behalf, and I heard David Starr Jordan say no man could tell whether it was a mere jargon of words, meaningless and empty, or whether monism was the profoundest philosophy the world has ever known."

"I don't care what you call it," said Adam, stoutly. "I am not afraid of names, and I don't know anything about any of those religions, pantheism, Spinozaism, or monism; but I do know I would rather a child of mine saw God in everything than that he saw God in nothing save his own narrow creed. I would rather he was a pantheist than a Calvinist. Spinoza never burned any one, did he, nor preached that hell was paved with infants' skulls?"

Robin clapped her hands and laughed again. "I beg your pardon for laughing," she said, "but the idea of Spinoza, the 'God-intoxicated man,' presiding over an auto-da-fe is too absurd. If you only remembered anything about his gentle, retiring spirit and melancholy life; I think he was better known in our time than in his own, but his philosophy does not satisfy me. I am willing to grant the identity of life, and its divine possibilities, but I cannot worship it as life itself, a mere manifestation of nature. I know that there is such a thing as living rock, and that it may be killed by a bolt of lightning as readily as a tree; but this does not make it any more worthy of worship than I am, and that is terribly unworthy. The rock and I are types of life, stages in the development of life, but for my child there must be something better. For the child I must lay hold on the everlasting life; I must find the rock that is higher than I. I do not know of any manifestation of that life so great, so godlike, and so lovable as His who said, 'I am the way, the truth, and the life.'"

"But surely you do not believe in the Immaculate Conception?" asked Adam, incredulously.

"I don't care anything about it, one way or the other. It's the immaculate life that concerns me. As you said yourself a few minutes ago, words cannot frighten me. Am I going to stand carping, 'Can any good come out of Nazareth?' What do I care if it comes out of Sodom and Gomorrah, if it is good?"

"But you surely don't believe in the miracles?" he asked.

"Surely I do, in some of them at least. I have seen a miracle or so myself. Besides, if you remember the greatest proof He gave was that the gospel was preached to the poor. Buddha was a prince; he whom the Jews expected was to reign as a king. What a fall was there! the gospel of hope and joy was brought to the children of Gibeon, the hewers of wood and drawers of water. The love of Christ has wrought greater miracles than He did. Look at the arena in Rome. Look at the whole countless army of martyrs. When Mrs. Booth died, the eighty thousand women that nightly walked the streets of London rebelled, and for once the long aisles of brick and stone were swept clean of that awful arraignment of civilization. That was more of a miracle than satisfying three thousand souls with food. At least, it's enough of a miracle for me."

The tears came into her eyes, and she gathered up her pans and went into the house.



XVIII

Are God and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams? So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life:

So careful of the type? but no. From scarped cliff and quarried stone She cries, "A thousand types are gone: I care for nothing, all shall go."

TENNYSON.

They were sitting in the doorway together. Robin rested her chin in her hands and looked down the valley, the lines of perplexity deepening in her forehead.

"If only we had an angel with a sword, or without one, to tell us what to do," she said. "If only we were deeply religious with the old-fashioned orthodox religion, that would enable us to believe we were predestined not to be drowned—"

"Or if we believed in a personal God, without whom not a sparrow falleth, though the waters cover the face of the earth and blot out millions of His creatures," answered Adam. "After all, can we do better than follow the dictates of Nature?"

"Do you mean to look through Nature up to Nature's God?" answered Robin. "How can we worship any God as pitiless as Nature? Nature is strong, but is it our place to help her in her care for the single type? Perhaps we are the trilobites of a new Silurian period; well, trilobites were painfully common, but we need not be. Nature's laws are immutable, so we have been told with wearying insistence, but suppose you and I have wills as strong as Nature herself? Suppose we ask what she has done for the humanity of which we are a part, that she should demand fresh victims from us? Oh, I know; you will tell me,—

"'What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!'

"And I should answer,—

"'What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor.'

"David or Hamlet, it comes to the same thing. Where are the crowns now, and how can we say Solomon was not right when he said the end of it all was vanity? What is Nature, and on what compulsion must we obey her? The imperative mandates of our own hearts? But what if our hearts are at war with our heads? Are we to follow no higher law than the blind instinct that moves the house-fly? Or will we aspire to the indomitable soul of the mocking-birds that feed their young in captivity until they see they are prisoners for life, and then bring them poisonous spiders that they may die rather than live under such conditions? Shall we give hostages to Nature when she has given nothing to us?"

She was standing now and speaking with more vehemence than was her wont. Adam caught her hands, as she flung them out with a gesture full of scorn.

"Do you really think we have nothing? How many million lovers have envied Adam and Eve their paradise? This Nature against which you bring so railing an accusation,—has she taken away more than she has given us? We had ambitions, you and I, but the way of ambition is full of weariness and disappointment and bitterness of spirit. We did not expect peace and comfort and joy, but work and turmoil. Our slates were set with a sum—"

"Yes, a sum in vulgar fractions," answered Robin.

"Perhaps; it was a sum in which the unknown and unknowable quantity determined the result. We had seen a good deal of what is called life,—it is a good name to distinguish it from the death it so much resembles,—and I am half inclined to think Nature has been merciful."

"But if she was merciful to them," said Robin, quickly, "why were we omitted?"

"She gave them oblivion, the hereafter, whatever comes hereafter. She gave us each other. We were going to miss one another in the careers we had mapped out. We might have lost each other forever, or for aeons of years. Nothing but a general breaking up of everything would ever have flung us into each other's arms. We were too much interested in my career, my vast influence on the political situation, to consider any existence apart from the setting we had chosen for the play. And, after all, what was it, that career from which we hoped so much? I stood waiting my cue, ready to act my part in the farce or tragedy, whichever it turned out to be."

"I think it was more like a circus," said Robin.

"Very like a circus," he admitted with grim appreciation. "A circus in which no one knew whether he was to be a ringmaster or a clown. There were the financial tight-rope walkers, and the social lion-tamers, and snake-charmers, and the political acrobats whose falls were unsoftened by any kind of network. There were heat and dust and discomfort, and weary, wretched animals looking out of cages at other weary, tortured animals, that were sometimes scarcely less pachydermatous than themselves. I know the program we had mapped out, the triumphal entry, the daring leaps, the cheers,—but was it worth while? After all, does one care to be the champion bareback rider in life's hippodrome? Nature swept away my sawdust ring, but she gave me heaven for a canopy, earth for an arena, you for a queen. At times I am disposed to take a fatalist view of the case, and think that God, or Nature, knew there was no more to be done with the earth, not so much because of its wickedness, as on account of its stupidity and cruelty. All my plans had centered in a political career, and yet how could a man touch politics and remain undefiled? Yes, I know there were honorable men in politics, but they were lonely, and they hated with an unspeakable hatred all the means that were used to keep them there. And there were any number of men who had been honorable once. When a man becomes possessed by the desire of place, his backbone becomes elastic, and he stoops to things of which he had believed himself incapable. I don't know what it is, but it weakens a man's moral fibre, and breaks down the tissues of his will, and gives him mental astigmatism. How dare I say I should have been any better than the rest?"

"Do you remember your address, a year ago Flag Day, and the old man with the little bronze button of the Civil War veteran, who stood in front, and shook hands with you afterwards, with tears running down his face? And the applause? Can you honestly say that you find 'to utter love more sweet than praise'? You have told me of your dream of a home, but Emerson said, 'not even a home in the heart of one we love can satisfy the awful soul that dwells in clay.' Can it satisfy you, who hoped and expected so much?"

He hesitated and did not reply at once.

"Are you sure you are not making a virtue of necessity?" she asked a little bitterly.

"I think as much as anything," he said slowly, "I was excusing myself for not having known all along that the real life, and the most useful one, is the one we could have made together. Principalities and powers and empires and republics have fallen. When God wants to regenerate the world, He begins with the family. Now I," with unspeakable scorn,—"I intended to begin with a different primary law. I could have made a good home, but I was intent on making an indifferent, honest congressman, or senator, or perhaps president. In a way your home always meant a good deal of what I am trying to say. You always had some one on hand you were trying to make capable of great things by believing in them. You made us welcome, and were ready to listen to our troubles, our literary curiosities, our musical gems and our aspirations. Suppose I had had sense enough to refuse the husks and choose—"

"Don't say it," she answered. "Don't say it, even if you mean it, for I should have sent you away, and have felt like reviling you for putting your hand to the plow and turning back. Your ambitions were the most attractive thing about you then. I hadn't pinned my faith on a primary law; I think it was government ownership that I regarded as the great regenerator. I am glad if my home seemed homelike to any one; it never reached my ideal; and when a woman's home isn't the hub of her universe,—well, she takes to china painting, or gossip, or philanthropy; a man takes to poker or politics. I took to politics, second-hand. Personally and concretely I abhorred the whole miserable farce, but abstractly, and as a means to an end which I greatly desired, I found it interesting. I admired you infinitely more than I liked you in those days, but I wouldn't have married you under any circumstances."

"Why?"

"First, because I didn't want to marry any one; I didn't want to care that much. And, secondly, because I wanted you to devote yourself to your country, and had you possessed a family your devotion would have been divided. I don't see," she went on reflectively, "how you, who know so well how empty it all was, and how hopeless the endeavor to lift it an inch,—I don't see how you can think anything would justify us in making it go on."

"But, on the other hand," he said, "are we justified in snuffing it all out? There was so much that was beautiful, and the possibilities were so glorious! Sweetheart, I shall not believe you love me if you think the world all cold and dark. I believe now the one law it needs, or has ever needed, is love, the fulfilling of the law."

Robin shook her head, and there was a pathetic quiver about her sensitive mouth. "Is it so? We have sung, ''Tis love, it makes the world turn round,' but is it so? Would you give your world that one great principle as the whole of its code of laws?"

"Yes, I would," he answered sturdily. "I should not revive a single law, not even the Ten Commandments, nor any of their variations. You have to read the statutes provided for unnamable crimes to understand just how bad mankind could be. I should not bother my world with Draco, or Solon, or Justinian, or Coke, or Blackstone. I should give it the code of Christ, 'Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them.' To love one's neighbor as oneself,—isn't that code enough for any world? And I should make the neighbor include every dumb creature."

She turned to him, her face radiant with love and trust.

"There is no difference between us in reality," she said: "you would found your political economy on the teachings of Christ, and I my religion. If we realize the unity of life, we must make our religion our law, and our law our religion. Sometimes I think the hand of the Lord is in it, for surely, surely, there never was a nobler man on earth than you."



XIX

For the race is run by one and one and never by two and two.

KIPLING.

"Do you remember the name of that man we knew," said Adam one day, "who wrote a book to prove the immortality of the body? He did prove that various people had lived well on to two hundred years. If we were sure of that, we might get the earth very fairly started."

Robin laughed. "We are not apparently growing any older," she said; "but we can hardly count on more than a hundred years each."

"There is one thing you haven't taken into consideration," said Adam. "Our children would be several thousand years ahead of the original children of the Garden; they would be further along than you and I in a good many ways."

"No," she said, "I haven't forgotten, but I do not know how much of a load they would bring with them into the world. We called it heredity, the Hindoos called it karma, and, though that is different, educators called it the recapitulation theory."

Adam shook his head. "I understand heredity," he said, "but karma and recapitulation are too much for me."

"Karma is our heritage from former existences," she answered, "that may have been lived here or elsewhere. It is the sum of our past, good and bad. It is based on a belief in reincarnation, and it is the law that whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap. It is justice untempered by mercy, and it is at variance with the doctrine of vicarious atonement, though one may believe it and worship Christ as the highest type of love the world has ever known. Naturally, it does not appeal to the people who are willing to let some one bear the cross for them, and yet I have wondered whether, if we were sure we should not gather figs from thistles, we should sow the thistles so freely. The recapitulation theory makes the child pass through the evolutionary stages of the nation or nations he represents. It has a kind of seven ages of man of its own, and brings him down through all phases,—the savage, the hunter, the explorer, the conqueror, the builder. I don't pretend fully to understand it. I heard one of its ablest exponents say once, 'The soul of the German nation is in the German boy.' Heredity curses or blesses, sometimes both. Before any of these theories prospective parents might well hesitate."

"Which do you believe?" asked Adam, curiously.

She reflected a moment. "A little of all three; not all of any of them; one would have to be a profound student to understand fully what their adherents claim for them. Heredity plays strange freaks now and then. It is easier to account for Abraham Lincoln by the second theory than by either of the others. His shiftless, untidy mother and commonplace father do not explain such a soul as his; nor was there any reversion in his childhood to the original savage instincts that make children dismember grasshoppers—rather the reverse. I like better to think that, like that other Deliverer, who was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, he came to do the will of his and our Father which art in heaven,—came gladly, freely, knowing the end from the beginning."

Adam sat up suddenly and looked at her with startled eyes. "Then you think—you mean—you don't believe—surely you don't believe we have anything to do with our coming here?"

She smiled. "Surely I do. Our coming is sad enough when we do it voluntarily. It would be quite intolerable to have existence thrust upon us. Besides, it seems blasphemous to me to believe that God has given to every human being the power to bestow an eternal existence. The responsibility is great enough when it is simply a matter of so living that noble souls may seek to be born of us, and undertaking to give them sound minds and bodies."

Adam looked unconvinced and troubled. "Where on earth did you get all that?" he asked.

"Well, it is to my mind only an elaboration of Descartes' 'I think, therefore I am.' I am, presupposes that I have been, and will be. If you can't destroy one drop of water, you can't destroy me. If you drop the water on red-hot iron, it instantly becomes an imperceptible mist, the mere ghost of itself, but it will ultimately become fluid again. It seems to me that the scientific fact gives a sound basis for the psychologic probability."

"But think of all the miserable human beings born daily. Do you think any one would choose such surroundings?"

"You and I never wanted to go anywhere badly enough to crowd ourselves under the cow-catcher, or upon the trucks, but there were those who did. We didn't want to see the parade badly enough to stand on the street corner for hours; but you worked your way through college, and we have both sat in the top gallery to hear 'Tannhaeuser.' We were willing to put up with the whips and scorns, which is another way of saying the garlic and tobacco, for the sake of the music. In any event the experiment was of brief duration. No one gets more than a fragment in an ordinary lifetime."

"If you think that," said Adam, "I can't see that there is any responsibility about it. We should not thrust life on any one."

"True," she assented. "Your position is unassailable, but still it seems to me the responsibility remains. In the first place, granting that my hypothesis is true, how can we tell whether to live is gain? How do we know that the next generation would be better and stronger than we are? Moreover, I only give this to you as my idea. I do not say it is true; I believe it to be so, but I do not know anything whatsoever about it. I can't prove it, and it may be transcendental rubbish. I rather imagine you think it is."

"Not exactly that," he said, coloring and laughing, "but certainly it is rather amazing when one hears it for the first time. I daresay I shall come to believe it too. So far as I can see, you are about as unorthodox as I am."

"I have times of relapse," she said. "Then I think we are being tempted like the first Adam and Eve. They were commanded to multiply and reign. You and I wouldn't ask anything better, but as a rule one's duty is not attractive. It seems to me just as likely that we are to prove that the lesson is learned, and a man and woman may love each other unselfishly and nobly, foregoing their own desires to save others. Under the old dispensation it was said, 'Greater love hath no man than this;' is it not possible now that the greatest love is that which lays down its life untransmitted? If Christ could pray that the cup of suffering and death might pass from Him, dare we press the bitter draught of being to other lips?"

"Dare we dash the full goblet of joy and opportunity from them?" asked Adam, gravely.

"I wish I knew," she said. "I wish I knew!"

"Have you ever thought what it will mean," he said, "if we adopt the other alternative? Have you thought of the desolation and loneliness of growing old and helpless and finally—" He stopped, and she threw out her hands as if to ward off the thoughts he called before her.

"Oh, yes, yes, I have thought, and it is terrible. I keep remembering a picture I saw in the French Exhibit. It was of a man and a woman; the woman was dead, and he had dug her grave, his broken sword lay at his side, and he had wrapped her in his coat, and begun to cover her over. He could not go on, and knelt, looking at her with a despair on his face that has haunted me ever since. The name, Manon Lescaut, meant nothing to me then, but the story of the picture was enough by itself. All last year I kept seeing that terrible picture. Sometimes it was you, sometimes it was I, that dug the grave and went mad looking into it."

"I should not bury you," said Adam, grimly. "I should carry you to the cliff and take you in my arms and jump. The sea is deep and cruel there."

"Sometimes," she hesitated a moment, then went on,—"sometimes I think that would be the best way for us now, I mean if we decide we have no right to be happy in the old way; for I should be afraid we could not always be strong."

"Very well," he answered; "when we decide, it shall be literally life or death."



XX

The ant and the moth have cells for each of their young, but our little ones lie in festering heaps in homes that consume them like graves; and night by night, from the corners of our streets, rises up the cry of the homeless,—"I was a stranger and ye took me not in."

RUSKIN.

For a time they busied themselves with different things about their little home, worked in the garden, and held a round-up of their stock that they might know the extent of their wealth; and because, in a life quite apart from human beings, animals come to take their place to a greater extent than might seem possible.

It was a very pleasant time. Everything seemed so gentle, so willing to be friends, and so certain of their good-will.

"You used to be a Kipling fiend," said Adam, one morning, when they had been salting the cattle, and were resting before going home. "Didn't he write a Jungle tale about 'How Fear Came'? He ought to be here now to write another to show how Fear might go."

"It seems to me he did," Robin answered, running her fingers through the short, curly forelock of a colt that stood placidly licking her hand. "I wonder that they don't remember longer, or perhaps they know that we think they are folks. Really, I think we ought to hold a reception, a kind of salon, once a week, so as to keep acquainted with our neighbors."

"You are an absurd child," he said, laughing; "but does that mean that you have really decided to go on living?"

"I don't know," she said. "What did we determine? By the way, which side of this question are you on?"

"Both," he said decidedly.

"Oh! then we can't do like those men Cooper told about, in 'The Pioneers,' wasn't it? who argued and argued every night until at last they convinced each other, and then started in to argue it out again."

"No," he answered, "I rather think that we are answering ourselves rather than each other, anyhow. Robin, where was 'the land of Nod'?"

"That is one of the questions that I was sent to bed for asking a preacher who was visiting at our house, when I was about seven years old. They hurried me hence before he had a chance to answer, so I never found out. But I know what you are thinking of, and I have thought of it too. Perhaps there isn't any land of Nod, or any land at all. And I have thought, also, how it would be if one of us died and left the other with little children. You might take my body and jump off the rock, but you couldn't take them too, and still less could you leave them."

"I have thought of the risk to you," he said, "and felt that not even for the sake of a child would I let you come so near death."

She laughed a little. "That is really funny," she said. "You must have been reading Michelet; I never thought of that at all. I am very well and strong, and my habits and my clothes are not such as to hamper my life nor endanger that of another. There is next to no risk, so far as that is concerned, certainly none I would not gladly take. But I have dreaded afterwards, when the child might fall ill and need help that we could not give it."

"Because there are no doctors in the world?" said Adam, with a touch of cynicism. "I don't know that we are not better off without them. The greatest of them confessed that it was guess-work. The best doctors I ever knew were always trying to make their patients live more simply, take more exercise, and give nature a chance; they never resorted to medicine until there was nothing else to do. If all the germs and microbes have gone with them, the earth can stand the loss. The main thing is to be well born, and when the body is healthy and leads a natural life, while it may know pain, it need not be a prey to disease. Very few children had a heritage worth having. It had been bartered away. No wonder we were taught to say, 'There is no health in us.'"

"Do you remember Gannett's 'Not All There'?" she asked soberly. "I am not sure I can recall it, but it began this way:—

"Something short in the making, Something lost on the way, As the little soul was taking Its path to the break of day.

"Only his mood or passion, But it twitched an atom back, And she for her gods of fashion Filched from the pilgrim's pack.

"The father did not mean it, The mother did not know, No human eye had seen it, But the little soul needed it so.

"Thro' the street there passed a cripple Maimed from before its birth; On the strange face gleamed a ripple Like a half dawn on the earth.

"It passed, and it awed the city As one not alive nor dead; Eyes looked and burned with pity. 'He is not all there,' they said.

"Not all! for part is behind it, Lying dropped on the way; That part—could two but find it, How welcome the end of day!"

For a long while neither spoke, then Robin went on. The colt had wandered back to its mother, and she sat with her hands clasped, and her eyes looking far out to sea.

"I don't blame people for dreading the responsibility, nor even for shirking it, when I think of all the conditions we had to face. Men who thought they had hedged their trades about with so much skill that they had banished competition, found that they had only succeeded in bringing into the field the machine that banished them. And everywhere there was such ghastly poverty,—poverty of body and brain and soul. We had gone back to patrons and patronesses. Men or women did not do anything of themselves any more,—they did not sing or play, or give a reading, or exhibit a painting. They starved, or they performed or exhibited 'under the auspices of.' It has always been the same. Given a pure democracy, and demos reigns sooner or later. The shiftless go to the bottom, the thrifty to the top, and then like the upper and nether millstones, they grind everything between them. That which is below cries, 'Alms!' and that which is above responds, 'Largesse,' and the voice that cries, 'Justice,' is stifled between. The stone that crushed from above and the rock that ground from below were very near, and men dreaded them, for when the grist is ground, and flint strikes upon flint, the conflagration is at hand. Do you think I am talking like a Populist campaign book? I only know what I saw, and what the poets have said. I wouldn't dare to be as radical as Lowell, nor as bitter as Tennyson, nor as savage as Carlyle, or Ruskin, or Hugo. We had overcome the sharpness of death, but whence could we hope for deliverance from the sharpness of living?"

"We have been delivered," said Adam, slowly, "but you don't seem disposed to be the Miriam of this Israel—limited."

"Well, no," answered Robin. "I should like to believe that you and I were rewarded for our superhuman excellence by being saved when Pharaoh and his multitudes went under, but a somewhat wide acquaintance with other people forbids. On the other hand, we can't have been left on account of our superlative badness. Truly, Adam, don't you feel sometimes as if you would rather have died with the rest?"

He hesitated. The question was so unexpected, and so fraught with possibilities. She watched the struggle in his face and honored him for it. He put back a stray lock of hair and kissed her forehead before he answered.

"The streak of cowardice that we all of us have in us," he said finally, "the distrust of myself, and the doubt of all systems of life of which I know anything, prompts me to answer yes; for I think even if we had died, you and I would still be together. I think sometimes we have been, in the past, but whether we have or not, I know we shall be in the future. So while the mental part of me,—which it seems to me is the weakest and most contemptible part of man, because it is always reasoning him out of what his soul tells him is true,—while the mental part of me might find it easier to be dead than to know what we ought to do, everything else in me rejoices. I know that in the great plan we have a part, it seems to me a very happy and beautiful part. In all our world there is no cause for anger or hatred or sin. There is friendliness and content and gentleness and love all around us; look up, dear, and see how near heaven seems."

But though she looked up, she saw only the light in his eyes.



XXI

"We're all for love," the violins said.

SIDNEY LANIER.

Robin's music was a source of great delight to both of them. There was such a sense of time, infinite and unlimited, that they ceased to be the hurrying mortals of earth. The joy of life crept into their hearts, and they grew young with the new world.

One evening they watched the full moon come up over the mountains. She had been playing a few desultory airs, and looking up asked,—

"Who is it says 'music is love in search of a word'?"

"If you don't know, I'm sure I don't," answered Adam, laughing. "Do you know that you quote entirely too much?"

"Oh, yes," she said lightly. "I always knew that if I ever should break into print, the critics, supposing they ever deigned to notice me, would say, as they said of Lubbock's 'Beauties of Life,' that it wasn't a book, but a compendium of useful quotations. But do you really dislike quoting? I think it takes as much or nearly as much originality to quote well as to invent."

"Oh, no!" he interposed.

"No? Well, it seems so to me. I think the thing first myself, that is original so far as I am concerned, though it may be old as the hills, and then it comes to me afterward, in a dozen ways, perhaps, as other people have said it. I realize that in the kaleidoscope of life the pattern before my mind's eye approximates that which others have seen. We don't say a man knows too many synonyms or antonyms, and I don't see much difference."

"I have a misty memory that quotation is said to be a confession of inferiority," answered Adam.

"That's Emerson," she said, laughing; "but he also says, 'genius borrows nobly,' and I am willing to confess inferiority to a great many people; all that implies is that one should only quote well. If it wasn't that I'm not sure of the words, and that I can't verify them, I should confound you with a citation from Disraeli."

"Go on," said Adam, lazily; "I don't mind being crushed."

"It is to the effect that people think that where there is no quotation there must be great originality. Then he says, 'the greater part of our writers, in consequence, have become so original that no one cares to imitate them; and those who never quote are seldom quoted.' That's about it. Now are you answered?" She laughed gleefully. "It is delicious to disagree with you. I had almost forgotten that it was possible."

He echoed her laugh with the carefree heartiness of a boy. "I am going to make a riddle," he said. "Prepare yourself; this is the first conundrum of the new world. Why is it better to disagree than to differ?"

She made a little grimace. "It's a wonder the Sphinx does not rise from the other side of the world and eat you," she said with derision. "Anybody who loved anybody could answer such a poor little excuse for a riddle as that; besides, it sounds like an extract from somebody's 'First Easy Lessons in Rhetoric.' Don't you see that I can disagree with you, while I must differ from you? That is too disgracefully easy. Indeed, Adam, that riddle of yours brings back every doubt, for they say—scientists and ologists and learned people, you know—that there is hope for delinquents and defectives, but none for degenerates, and that is an awfully degenerate joke."

"Play for me," he said, "and don't call names."

She lifted the bow and drew it across the strings in a series of cadences so wildly mournful that he shuddered. She put the bow down, and laid her hand upon the strings to still them. In the old days she had been given to sudden changes of mood, but of late she had been almost serene.

"What is it?" he asked gently.

"Oh, nothing,—everything! I was thinking of another thing which those wise ones said," she answered, with more bitterness than she had shown for many months. "It was that word 'degenerate' brought it back. You know birds are a very low order of being, a branch of the reptile family, in truth, and I have heard people say that musicians are generally lacking in something. They either have no moral or financial sense, and cannot be bound by ordinary rules. And I am musical to the very tips of my fingers. It is as if I could hear the song of the silence,—I feel its vibrations like those of a great organ."

She walked up and down, her hands back of her head, and the moonlight shining on her upturned, troubled face.

"There is another scientific fact you forget," he said.

She stopped to listen, and he went on.

"When a race has run its course, nature cries 'habet,' and nothing can alter its fate. It was not alone the merciless onslaughts of the white man that exterminated the buffalo. They died, and none came to take their places. They vanished, less on account of man's cruelty than by reason of their own sterility. Degenerates or regenerates, can't we leave the decision with a power that forever builds or destroys, in accordance with a law we do not understand, a higher law that comes from the source of all law, whatever that source may be? Don't think any more, but play for me. In spite of my lecture, I will quote too; my mother used to sing a hymn that went like this,—

'I'd soar and touch the heavenly strings, And vie with Gabriel while he sings,'—

Do you know it?"

She began the old tune, "Ariel," and then wandered on, playing many airs that brought back forgotten days. Adam threw himself down on the grass to listen, half jealously, for she seemed to forget everything. She had seated herself on a great boulder, and, leaning back against it, her eyes looking into the blue depths above her, she played on and on. The old tunes were merged in new ones, and the high sustained notes of the Cavalleria, the subtle minor of Wagner, the exquisite sweetness of Beethoven and Schubert filled the moonlit canon, and still she played on, melodies new to Adam, intoxicating, full of a wild ecstasy, that filled his very soul, and thrilled through him till he felt all power of resistance swept away. Every other desire in the world was lost in the supreme and overwhelming longing to gather her to his heart and hold her there forever. The very air was steeped in melody. The full majestic chords rose and melted in unison with the high, exquisitely sweet notes, and throbbed their life away. She held the bow suspended a moment, then very softly, half unconsciously, played a dreamy lullaby, and laid the violin down in her lap.

Adam took her and it into his arms.

"Be careful, put it down gently," she said faintly; "it is your soul and mine. Do you not know the secret of Antonio Stradivari, of all the great makers of violins? Ah, they solved our riddle, Love, ages ago. Do you not remember the story of Jacob Steiner, and how he spent days and days in the woods, selecting the trees for his violins, and how the spirits of the trees revenged themselves by telling him of their ruined lives till he went mad?"

"But there was no madness in this music," Adam answered, "except, except—"

"The supreme, sublime madness of love? Do you not know, surely you do, that every perfect violin is as much man and woman as you and I? The back of the violin is made from the timber of the female tree, the belly of the male tree. The harmony depends on their vibrations, as they clasp each other in an embrace as real—"

"As this," he cried, drawing her closer, and bending his handsome head until their lips met. "Sweet, must I envy that violin?"

He felt her heart beating wildly against his own, their arms closed around each other convulsively. The sweetness of the music-laden, flower-scented air filled his senses.

"God! how I love you!" he said.

A frightened look came into her eyes, and she struggled, for a moment, futilely.

"Let me go!" she whispered; "let me go!"

"Do you want me to?" he answered, studying her face in the moonlight.

"No," she said. "No, never again, but, oh, Adam!"



XXII

I'm weary of conjectures—this must end them.

ADDISON.

Adam had to go to the cane-fields across the range, and one of the calves needed Robin's ministrations, so she could not go with him. He started before the stars were set, that he might be back before night, and returned twice to kiss her before he finally got away.

Left with the long day ahead of her, restless and lonely, she gave the small house a thorough sweeping and cleaning. She had finished her dusting, and was rearranging the furniture, when she shoved back the long chest and struck the framework of the window with some little violence. It was enough to jar a rusty key from its place above the casement, and it dropped upon the chest with a kind of ominous clink as it struck the lock, and fell upon the floor. She took it up and looked at it curiously, and then, kneeling, fitted it in the lock.

"I wonder," she mused, "what I shall set free if I open this box; is it Pandora's? But there was nothing left in hers but hope, and that is all we need. How happy we could be if we dared to hope!"

She turned the key with a wrench, and the hasp shot from its place. The chest was nearly empty, there being but one parcel in it. This was done up carefully in a square of linen, pinned here and there. On the bottom of the chest were several folds of white paper. Very slowly she lifted out the parcel and opened it. The treasure was a gown; it was of a heavy, satiny weave of linen, very yellow and creased. The bodice was made without sleeves or neck, and the skirt was a kind of kilt plaited affair; the whole effect was Greek, and, simple as it was, it seemed beautiful to Robin after her year of dark, utilitarian clothing. There was white underwear, and even white stockings, and a pair of slippers.

Robin drew a long breath of delight, and laying all her finery upon the table placed the irons over the tripod that she might smooth the wrinkles out, and set about making the necessary alterations at once. She worked rapidly in spite of her excitement, but the hours slipped away.

"I must try it on," she said, "before Adam comes; there will be plenty of time, and then I will put it away until—"

Shroud or wedding-gown? She did not finish the sentence. She dressed slowly; but when she had finished she was startled to see that the image in the glass was so much fairer than she had ever thought herself. Suddenly she discovered, with something like a pang, that there was no belt, and hurried back to the chest to look again.

As she twitched out the remaining layer of paper in her eagerness, a long white satin ribbon dropped from it, and a little heap of fine muslin lay on the floor of the chest. She caught up the ribbon with an exclamation of delight and adjusted it with trembling fingers. Her flushed cheeks and radiant eyes, the long heavy braid of hair, her round white arms and shoulders, made her a vision of delight indeed. When she had quite completed her toilet, she sat down by the chest to inspect its last secret. As she took up the pile of lace and muslin, her heart seemed to stop beating for a moment. She had forgotten. Only the hands of the prospective mother could have fashioned such dainty garments as these. Everywhere the eternal question. All her perplexities had fallen from her in the joy of dressing herself as Adam's bride should be decked, howbeit Adam saw her not, but the great problem of life confronted her still.

THE END