be so easy for me to shut myself off from all the world,
and wait--wait, I say, and work. No, I think you will not forget. There
has grown within me with love a mystic power to which I can give no name.
But I know that in the long silences of the night while I sit reflecting
after the day's toil is done--that something shall go forth from me to
you, and you shall turn restlessly in your sleep and remember my kisses.
And now good-bye. Do not interpret anything I have said as a rebuke. You
are altogether fair in my eyes, without spot or blemish, and I would not
exchange the pain you have given me for the joys of a thousand fleeting
loves. And once again, good-bye.

(Enclosed with the foregoing)

DEAR SIR:

My daughter has read your letter (I have not) and asked me to return it to
you, together with those you had previously sent her. Let me assure you,
sir, that it is only after much earnest prayer that I have dared to step
in where my daughter's happiness was concerned and have commanded her to
cease from this correspondence. I trust I may retain your respect and
esteem.

Faithfully yours,
EZRA DOANE.

XLIV

EXTRACT FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

I have been looking over her letters and mine, steeping my soul in the
bitterness of its destiny; and what has impressed me most is a note of
anxiety in them from the first, "some consequence yet hanging in the
stars," which gave warning of their futile issue. As I read them one after
another, the feeling that they were mine, a real part of my life, written
to me and by me, became inexplicably remote. I could not assure myself
that they were anything more than some broken memory of "old, unhappy,
far-off things," a single, sobbing note of love's tragic song that has
been singing in the world from the beginning. Our tale has been made one
with the ancient theme of the poets. I ask myself why love, the one sweet
reality of life, should have been turned for men into the well-spring of
sorrows--for out of it, in one way or another, whether through
gratification or disappointment, sorrow does inevitably flow. Has some
jealous power of fate or the gods willed that man shall live in eternal
deceptions, and so fenced about with cares and dumb griefs and many
madnesses this great reality and dispeller of illusion?

And thus from a brief dream of love