"Well," he said, "what is the matter? Oh, breakfast." He put down his newspaper. "I see," he added, "they have given this fellow Timmons five years, and serve him very right."

"John, you have forgotten something!" she said, stopping him on his way to the breakfast table and laying one of her delicate white hands on his shoulder.

"Eh? Forgotten something? Have I? What? I have a lot of important things on my mind," said he, looking down on the clear sweet, oval face, turned up to his.

"Whatever is on your mind, sir, you ought not to forget the duties of your lips. I have not had my good-morrow kiss, sir."

"I never had anything so important on my mind, or on my lips, Edy, as your kiss, dear." He took her in his arms and kissed her fondly.

"You grow better at compliments as the days go by."

"No dear, deeper in love."

"With such a commonplace kind of thing as a wife?"

"With the most un-commonplace sweetheart-wife in all the world."

"John, I am already beginning to feel quite a middle-aged wife, and my ring where it touches the guard is getting worn."

"That's a desperately serious thing-about the ring, I mean. Gold was too easily-worn a metal to marry you with, Edith. It should have been a plain band of adamant, and even that would not last long enough, dear."

"Are you practising a speech to win a constituency?"

"No. I am speaking out of my heart to keep what I have won."

"Do you know I envy you only for one thing?"

"And what is that?"

"All the love that you give me."

"But we are quits there, for I give all, you give all."

"But yours seems so much richer than mine."

"Does it, sweetheart? Then I am glad of that. For what I give is yours and you cannot help yourself but give it all back to me again."

"Oh, but what pains me is that I never seem to be able to give you any of mine. All you have got from me seems to be only your own going back and I long-oh, my darling, I do long-to show you that when all you gave me is given back to you I never could exhaust my own. Indeed, I could not, and keeping so much as I have is like a pain."

"Then what must I do to soothe my sweetheart's pain?"

"I do not know. I often think few people know what this love is."

"There is nothing worth calling love that is not such as ours. Love is more than content, more than joy, and not delusive with rapture. It is full and steady and unbroken, like the light of day."

"It is a pain, a pain, a pain! A secret pain. And do you know it is no less when you are away, and no greater when you are near? And it often seems to me that it is not exactly you as you are I love, but something that is beyond speech and thought, and the reason I want you is that you may hold my hand and love it too."

"My Sibyl! My Seer!"

"You and I are, as it were, waiting, and I should not wait if you were not with me."

"But I am with you, and always shall be. You are not afraid of my leaving you?"

"In the vulgar sense? Oh, no! Afraid of your going away and caring for some one else? Oh, no! That could not be."

"No, indeed. No, indeed."

"For I should call you back and show you my heart, and how could you leave me when you saw that there was nothing in all my heart but you? Your pity would not let you do that. You might take something else away, but you could not take away all that I had in my heart."

"You dreamer of holy dreams."

"It is by the firmness of the clasp of our hands we may know that we shall be together at the revelation. I think people coarsen their minds against love. I have heard that people think it is a sign of foolishness. But it can't be. Where, I think, the harm is that people harden their natures against it before it has time to become all-before it has time to spiritualize the soul. It seems to me that this love of one another that Christ taught is the beginning of being with God."

"Surely child, my child, my dear, you have come from some blessed place, you have come to us from some place that is better than this."

"No," she said softly. "No. There is no better place for me. I am where God placed me-in my husband's arms."

They had been married a couple of months, and it was June once more. Not a cloud had arisen between them for these two months, or during the months before. John Hanbury's mother said that Edith Grace had the same witchery in appearance as that village beauty of the days of George II., and that some quality of the blood which flowed in his veins made him succumb at once to her; for otherwise how could it be that he should almost immediately after parting from Dora Ashton fall helplessly in love with a girl so extraordinarily like Dora as Edith? How else could the fascination be accounted for?

Edith herself could give no reason except that things of the kind invariably arranged themselves independently of reason. All she knew was that at first she was disposed to worship him because of his illustrious origin, and gradually she lost this feeling and grew to love him for himself. And with that explanation and him she was content.

He, being a man, could not, of course, admit he did anything without not only a reason but an excellent reason too. He began by saying that she was even lovelier than Dora herself, which was a thing more astonishing in one at all like Dora that it counted for more than an even still more wonderful beauty of another type. Then he had been chiefly drawn towards the girl during her tardy convalescence because of her weakness and dependence, and the thousand little services he could render her, which kept him always watchful and attentive when near her, and devising little pleasures of fruit or flowers, or books, when not by her side.

"I do not believe," he would say to himself, "that I was ever in love with Dora. I do think we should never have got on well together, and I am certain when she and Whinfield are married, there will not be a happier couple in England excepting Edith and me. When I heard that Dora was to be one of the party on the homeward cruise of Whinfield's yacht, I knew all would be arranged before they saw England again. They are most admirably suited to one another.

"But she and I were not. I was always thinking of what I should like her to do and what I should not, and her political views had a serious interest for me, and I was perpetually trying to get her to adopt this, and modify that, and abandon the third. Nice way of making love, indeed!

"I never went forth to her with song and timbrel and careless joy. My mind ran more on propositions and principles. If at any time she said what I did not approve, I was ready to stop and argue the point. I did not know what love was then, and if I married Dora, I should have worn down her heart and turned into a selfish, crusty old curmudgeon in no time.

"But with Edith all was different. I never thought for a moment of what I should like her to do or say or think. I only thought of what the girl might like. I lost hold of myself, and did not care for searching in the mirror of the mind as to how I myself looked, or how she and I compared together. I did not pause to ask whether I was happy or not, so long as I saw she was happy. There was no refinement in the other feeling. It was sordid and exacting. With Edith a delicate subtlety was reached, undreamed-of before. An inspired accord arose between us. She leaned upon me, and I grew strong enough to support the burden of Atlas. I flung myself aside, so that I might not be impeded in my services to her. And I was welcomed in the spirit I came. She would take what I had to give, and she would like to take it. And so she accepted me, and all I had, and I had no care in my mind of myself or any of the gifts or graces which had been mine and now were hers. So I had enough time to think of her and no care to distract me from her."

That was his way of putting it to himself when he was in a very abstract and figurative humour. When he was not quite so abstract or figurative, he would say to himself, "It is sympathy, nothing more than sympathy. That is the Miracle Gold we should all try to make in the crucible of our hearts."