m, much as we see him in his portraits; but now his
countenance was flushed and mobile. Odd passions played about it, as
when on a sullen night in August summer lightnings flicker and merge.

His voice had found another cadence. "But Fate was not entirely
ruthless. Fate bade the child become a woman, and so grow tired of all
her childhood's playthings. This was after a long while, as we
estimate happenings. . . . I suffered then. Yes, I went down to the
doors of death, as people say, in my long illness. But that crude,
corporal fever had a providential thievishness; and not content with
stripping me of health and strength,--not satisfied with pilfering
inventiveness and any strong hunger to create--why, that insatiable
fever even robbed me of my insanity. I lived. I was only a broken
instrument flung by because the god had wearied of playing. I would
give forth no more heart-wringing music, for the musician had departed.
And I still lived--I, the stout little tradesman whom you loathed.
Yes, that tradesman scrambled through these evils, somehow, and came
out still able to word adequately all such imaginings as could be
devised by his natural abilities. But he transmitted no more
heart-wringing music."

She said, "You lie!"

He said, "I thank Heaven daily that I do not." He spoke the truth.
She knew it, and her heart was all rebellion.

Indefatigable birds sang through the following hush. A wholesome and
temperate breeze caressed these silent people. Bees that would die
to-morrow hummed about them tirelessly.

Then the poet said: "I loved you; and you did not love me. It is the
most commonplace of tragedies, the heart of every man alive has been
wounded in this identical fashion. A master-poet is only that wounded
man--among so many other bleeding folk--who perversely augments his
agony, and utilizes his wound as an inkwell. Presently time scars over
the cut for him, as time does for all the others. He does not suffer
any longer. No, and such relief is a clear gain; but none the less, he
must henceforward write with ordinary ink such as the lawyers use."

"I should have been the man," the woman cried. "Had I been sure of
fame, could I have known those raptures when you used to gabble
immortal phrases like a stammering infant, I would have paid the price
without all this whimpering."

"Faith, and I think you would have," he assented. "There is the
difference. At bottom I am a creature of the