mperament with high ideals, and with keen
and sensitive natures.

Their love was the poem of their lives.

And though a toast in society, and courted by the nobility of the old
world, Alice Westmore remembered only a moon-lighted night when she
told Cousin Tom good-bye. For though they had loved each other all
their lives, they had never spoken of it before that night. To them
it had been a thing too sacred to profane with ordinary words.

Thomas Travis had just graduated from West Point, and he was at home
on vacation before being assigned to duty. To-night he had ridden
John Paul Jones--the pick of his grandfather's stable of
thoroughbreds--a present from the sturdy old horse-racing,
fox-hunting gentleman to his favorite grandson for graduating first
in a class of fifty-six.

How handsome he looked in his dark blue uniform! And there was the
music of the crepe-myrtle in the air--the music of it, wet with the
night dew--for there are flowers so delicate in their sweetness that
they pass out of the realm of sight and smell, into the unheard world
of rhythm. Their very existence is the poetry of perfume. And this
music of the crepe-myrtle, pulsing through the shower-cooled leaves
of that summer night, was accompanied by a mocking-bird from his nest
in the tree.

Never did the memory of that night leave Alice Westmore. In after
years it hurt her, as the dream of childhood's home with green fields
about, and the old spring in the meadow, hurts the fever-stricken one
dying far away from it all.

How long they sat on the rustic bench under the crepe-myrtle they did
not know. At parting there was the light clasp of hands, and Cousin
Tom drew her to him and put his lips reverently to hers. When he had
ridden off there was a slender ring on her finger.

There was nothing in Italy that could make her forget that night,
though often from her window she had looked out on Venice,
moon-becalmed, while the nightingale sang from pomegranate trees in
the hedgerows.

Where a woman's love is first given, that, thereafter, is her heart's
sanctuary.

Alice Westmore landed at home again amid drum beats. War sweeps even
sentiment from the world--sentiment that is stronger than common
sense, and which moves the world.

On the retreat of the Southern army from Fort Donelson, Thomas
Travis, now Captain of Artillery, followed, with Grant's army, to
Pittsburgh Landing. And finding himself within a day's journey of his
old home, he