was consulting, Richard came upon a sheet of paper
on which was written something in verse. His eye went to the bottom of
the sheet to see there the source of the quotation--Browning--with
reference to title and page. No harm to read a quoted poem, certainly;
his eyes sought it eagerly as a relief from the sonorous phrasing of the
speech he was attempting to read. He had never seen the words before;
the first line--and he must read to the end. What a thing to find in a
dusty volume of forgotten speeches of a date long past!

Such a starved bank of moss
Till, that May-morn,
Blue ran the flash across:
Violets were born!

Sky--what a scowl of cloud
Till, near and far,
Ray on ray split the shroud:
Splendid, a star!

World--how it walled about
Life with disgrace
Till God's own smile came out:
That was thy face!

Speeches were forgotten; he devoured the words over and over again. They
seemed to him to have been made expressly for him. A starved bank of
moss--that was exactly what he had been, only he had not known it, but
had fancied himself a garden of rich resource. He knew better now,
starved he was, and starved he would remain--unless he could make the
violets his own. No doubt but he had found them!

He followed an impulse. Rising, the sheet of yellowed paper in his hand,
he walked over to the typewriter. Without apology he laid the sheet upon
the pile of typed ones at her side.

"See what I've found in an old volume of state speeches."

Roberta's busy hand stopped. Her eyes scanned the yellow page upon which
the stiff, fine handwriting, clearly that of a man, stood out legibly as
print. Business woman she might be, but she could not so far abstract
herself as not to be touched by the hint of romance involved in finding
such words in such a place.

"How strange!" she owned. "And they've been there a long time, by the
look of the paper and ink. I never saw the handwriting before. Perhaps
Uncle Calvin lent the book to somebody long ago and the 'somebody' left
this in it."

"Shall I put it back, or show it to Judge Gray?"

He remained beside her though she had handed back the paper.

"Put it back, don't you think? If you wrote out such words and left them
in a book, you would want them to stay there, not to be looked at
curiously by other eyes fifty years after."

"That's somebody's heart there on that sheet of old paper," said he.
Apparently he was looking at the paper; in reality he was st