d solemnly. "Let well enough alone.
I made up my mind to write no more the day you promised to marry me. I
told you that the lover had buried the poet, and I believed it. But I
find that the poet must come to life now and again--for a while at
least. But although the process will be neither pleasant nor painless,
I shall strangle him in time."

"Can you?"

"Yes--I think so."

"And be quite as happy as before?"

"Oh, I am not prophet enough for that. I can never be unhappy while I
have you."

"And I could never be happy if I let you kill a gift that is as living
a part of yourself as your sense of vision or touch. Do you suppose I
ever deluded myself with the dream that you would settle down into the
domestic routine of years--write political pamphlets for Hunsdon? I
knew this would come and I never have had a misgiving. I know you can
write without stimulant. Nothing can be more fanciful than that the
highest of all mental gifts must have artificial aid. That may be the
need of the little man driving a pen for his daily bread, of the small
talent trying to create, but never for you!"

"There is some strange congenital want. I am certain of it. And if I
gave way, Anne, I should be a madman for days, perhaps weeks--a
beast--oh, you have not the faintest suspicion; and all I am living
for in the wretched present is that you never may."

"I do not believe in permanent congenital weaknesses with a free rich
faculty like yours. I know how that fatal idea has wedged itself in
your brain--but if you try--if you persist--you will overcome it.
Promise me that you will try."

"You are so strong," he said sadly. "You cannot conceive, with
all your own imagination, the miserable weaknesses of the still
half-developed human brain. The greatest scientific minds that have
spent their lives in the study of the brain know next to nothing about
it. How should you, dear child? I know the curse that is the other
half of my gift to write, but of its cause, its meaning, I know
nothing. You are strong by instinct, but you have not the least idea
why or how you are strong. It is all a mysterious arrangement of
particles."

"But that is no reason one should not strive to overcome weakness."

"Certainly not. But I have so much at stake that I think it wisest to
kill the temptation outright, and not tempt providence by dallying
with it. And this regarding the arbitrary exercise of the imagination:
It is the small people of whom you s