re you go I want you to hear
what I've been reading over and over to myself just now. It is from a book
I got from Quebec, called _When Time Shall Pass_. It is a story of two
like you and me. The man is writing to the woman, and it has things that
you have said to me--in a different way."

"No, I don't talk like a book, but I know a star in a dark night when I
see it," he answered, with a catch in his throat.

"Hush!" she said, catching his hand in hers as she read, while all around
them the sounds of summer--the distant clack of a reaper, the crack of a
whip, the locusts droning, the whir of a young partridge, the squeak of a
chipmunk--were tuned to the harmony of the moment and her voice:

"'Night and the sombre silence, oh, my love, and one star shining!
First, warm, velvety sleep, and then this quick, quiet waking to your
voice which seems to call me. Is it--_is_ it you that calls? Do you
sometimes, even in your dreams, speak to me? Far beneath
unconsciousness is there the summons of your spirit to me?... I like
to think so. I like to think that this thing which has come to us is
deeper, greater than we are. Sometimes day and night there flash
before my eyes--my mind's eyes--pictures of you and me in places
unfamiliar, landscapes never before seen, activities uncomprehended
and unknown, bright, alluring glimpses of some second being, some
possible, maybe never-to-be-realized future, alas! Yet these
swift-moving shutters of the soul, or imagination, _or_ reality--who
shall say which?--give me a joy never before felt in life. If I am
not a better man for this love of mine for you, I am _more_ than I
was, and shall be more than I am. Much of my life in the past was
mean and small, so much that I have said and done has been
unworthy--my love for you is too sharp a light for my gross
imperfections of the past! Come what will, be what must, I stake my
life, my heart, my soul on you--that beautiful, beloved face; those
deep eyes in which my being is drowned; those lucid, perfect hands
that have bound me to the mast of your destiny. I cannot go back, I
must go forward: now I must keep on loving you or be shipwrecked. I
did not know that this was in me, this tide of love, this current of
devotion. Destiny plays me beyond my ken, beyond my dreams. "_O
Cithoeron!_" Turn from me now--or never, O my love! Loose me from the
mast, and let the storm and wave wash me out into the