only people realized how attractive absolute
simplicity, absolute candor is, the world would be so much easier a
place to live in, and so much more beautiful! Life is so full of small
shams, so many imperfectly hidden little deceits. Even if you had not
told me this strange story about yourself, I think that I should still
have felt this quality about you."

"I should like," he declared, "to have you conceive a passion for the
truth. I should like to have you feel that it was not possible to live
anyhow or anywhere else save in its light. If you really felt that it
would be like a guiding star to you through life, you would never be
able even to consider marriage with a man whom you did not love."

"This evening," she said slowly, "he is coming down. I was thinking it
all over this afternoon. I had made up my mind to say nothing about
you. Since you came, however, I feel differently. I shall tell him
everything."

"Perhaps," Burton suggested, hopefully, "he may be jealous."

"It is possible," she assented. "He does not seem like that but one can
never tell."

"He may even give you up!"

She smiled.

"If he did," she reminded him, "it would not make any difference."

"I will not admit that," he declared. "I want your love--I want your
whole love. I want you to feel the same things that I feel, in the same
way. You live in two places--in a real garden and a fairy garden, the
fairy garden of my dreams. I want you to leave the real garden and let
me try and teach you how beautiful the garden of fancies may become."

She sighed.

"Alas!" she said, "it is because I may not come and live always in that
fairy garden that I am going to send you away."

"Don't!" he pleaded,--"not altogether, at any rate. Life is so short,
so pitifully incomplete. We live through so many epochs and each epoch
has its own personality. It was not I who married Ellen. It was
Burton, the auctioneer's clerk. I cannot carry the burden of that
fellow's asinine mistakes upon my shoulders forever."

"I am afraid," she murmured, "that however clever the Mr. Burton of
to-day may be, he will never be able to rid himself altogether of his
predecessor's burdens."

They were leaning over the gate, looking into the deserted hayfield.
The quiet of evening had stolen down upon them. He drew a little nearer
to her.

"Dear," he whispered, "there isn't really any Ellen, there isn't really
any woman in the world of my thoughts, the world in which I li