the rare impulse of confidence! Suddenly it
seemed that what he had mistaken for self-sufficiency had been in
reality loneliness. He had learned to live to himself not because he was
of himself sufficient but because no one else, save the Button Moulder,
had ever come within speaking distance. Lorna Sinnet, for all his
admiration of her, had established no claim upon his confidence, yet
now, with this young girl, whom he had known but a few weeks, a new need
developed--a need to talk of himself! A primitive need indeed, but, like
all primitive needs, compelling.

We need not follow the history. Perhaps, reported, it would not seem
very lucid. There were blanks, unsaid things, twists of phrase, eloquent
nothings which, wonderfully understandable in themselves, do not report
well. Somehow he must have made it plain, for Esther understood it and
understood him, too, in a way which we, who have never sailed with him
under the moon, cannot hope to do. Faults of expression are no hindrance
to this kind of understanding. He did not talk well, was clumsy, not at
all eloquent, but magically she reconstructed the hopes and dreams of
his ambitious youth. From a few bald phrases she fashioned the
thunderbolt which shattered them, saw him stunned, then alive again,
struggling. With every ready imagination she leaped full upon the fires
of an ambition which accepted no check but fed upon difficulty and
overleapt obstacles. Between stories of his early college life, her
sympathy sensed the deadly strain which his narrative missed and, long
before he mentioned it, her foresight had descried the coming of hard
won success.

But the really vital thing, the core of the short history, she followed
slowly word by word, anxiously. It told of wonders which she did not
know--love, passion, despair! Now indeed he seemed to be speaking in a
strange language--yet not strange entirely. She hid each broken phrase
in her heart, knowing them rare, and wondering at the treasure entrusted
to her. Some of her girlhood she left behind her as she listened.
Something new, yet surely old, stirred faintly. What was this love he
spoke of? The breath of bygone passion brushed across her untouched soul
and left it trembling!

Into the long silence which followed the story her voice drifted like a
sigh.

"If she could only have lived until you came!"

It was of the girl wife she thought. Her heart was full of an aching
pity for that other girl whom life ha