ter you
know that I am not quite so much to blame as you may have thought,
still willing to give your name to me. It is a blessed hope, but I
scarcely dare to dwell upon it.

"The other day I was reading a book Mr. Fraser lent me, which took my
fancy very much, it was so full of contradictions. The unexpected
always happened in it, and there was both grief and laughter in its
pages. It did not end quite well or quite badly, or, rather it had
_no_ end, and deep down underneath the plotless story, only peeping up
now and again when the actors were troubled, there ran a vein of real
sorrow and sad, unchanging love. There was a hero in this odd book
which was so like life--who, by the way, was no hero at all, but a
curious, restless creature who seemed to have missed his mark in life,
and went along looking for old truths and new ideas with his eyes so
fixed upon the stars that he was always stumbling over the pebbles in
his path, and thinking that they were rocks. He was a sensitive man,
too, and as weak as he was sensitive, and often fell into pitfalls and
did what he should not, and yet, for all that, he had a quaint and
gentle mind, and there was something to like in him--at least, so
thought the women in that book. There was a heroine, too, who was all
that a heroine should be, very sweet and very beautiful, and she
really had a heart, only she would not let it beat. And of course the
hero and heroine loved each other: of course, too, they both behaved
badly, and things went wrong, or there would have been no book.

"But I tell you this story because once, in a rather touching scene,
this hero who made such a mess of things set forth one of the ideas
that he had found, and thought new, but which was really so very old.
He told the heroine that he had read in the stars that happiness has
only one key, and that its name is 'Love,' that, amidst all the
mutabilities and disillusions of our life, the pure love of a man and
woman alone stands firm and beautiful, alone defies change and
disappointment; that it is the heaven-sent salve for all our troubles,
the remedy for our mistakes, the magic glass reflecting only what is
true and good. But in the end her facts overcame his theories, and he
might have spared himself the trouble of telling. And, for all his
star-gazing, this hero had no real philosophy, but in his grief and
unresting pain went and threw himself into the biggest pitfalls that
he could find, and would have p