The truth of truths is love.

BAILEY.

As Adam went about his morning's work he was filled with a sense of
gladness, an exaltation of life he had never known before. He
stretched out his arms, as if to let all the glory of the earth meet
the profounder splendor of his soul. As he walked down the garden path
he looked with affection at the flowers they had planted together. But
for the absurdity of it, he could have woven a chaplet of them and
worn it. But the world had reached that height of civilization where
the symbol of the glad and living thing was too emotional; always and
everywhere we preferred the dead thing, the skin of the seal, the
shroud of the silkworm, the straw that was left after the flowers were
gone; and Adam was still civilized.

He accepted his happiness without a question. It was too real, too
keen, too great a revelation for him to stop to analyze it. He knew it
in every pulsation of his heart, in every imagination of his mind, and
with the quickened senses of the lover he perceived that Robin's
feelings differed from his own. For a year he had been lost in
introspection; now they seemed to have changed places, and she grew
silent and almost reserved.

"What is it, dear?" he said. "No, don't try to evade an answer. We
must not stop being frank with each other now."

She did not reply at once, and when she did her voice was so low that
he had to stoop to catch the words. "Do you think you do love me as
fully as you might have loved some one else, younger and happier than
I, better fitted to you? It doesn't seem as if you could; you never
did in the old days, you never even thought of it."

Adam laughed lightly. "I beg of you spare me, for this isn't 'so
sudden' at all." Then seeing that her mood forbade jest, he went on
seriously: "Really, I mean it. It's true I never made you pretty
speeches in the old days, nor stopped to consider whether I might have
done so had things been different; but then I never made pretty
speeches to any one. From the very beginning I have taken you as a
matter of course. It always seemed as if we had known each other from
the very first. You entered into my plans as if you had known them as
you might if we had gone to the same little red schoolhouse. I wish we
had! I'm jealous of the years when I didn't know you."

"But a whole year," she said doubtfully. "Are you sure it isn't just
loneliness and propinquity?"

Adam kissed her fingers one at a time.