wn admission. I have
sometimes thought that she may have had an ideal in her girlish days,
against whom, in after years, she measured others, and, finding them
come short, held them at arm's length. But, if I am right in this
surmise, he must have been a blind fool, unconscious of the priceless
love which might have been his, had he tried to win it. For I am
certain that, until that night, no man's love had ever flamed about
her; she had never felt herself enveloped in a cry which was all one
passionate, in-articulate, inexplicable, boundless need of herself.
While I thought she understood and responded,--Heaven knows I DID think
it,--she did not in the least understand, and was only trying to be
sympathetic and kind."

The doctor stirred in his chair, slowly crossed one leg over the other,
and looked searchingly into the blind face. He was finding these
confidences of the "other man" more trying than he had expected.

"Are you sure of that?" he asked rather huskily.

"Quite sure," said Garth. "Listen. I called her--what she was to me
just then, what I wanted her to be always, what she is forever, so far
as my part goes, and will be till death and beyond. That one word,--no,
there were two,--those two words made her understand. I see that now.
She rose at once and put me from her. She said I must give her twelve
hours for quiet thought, and she would come to me in the village church
next morning with her answer. Brand, you may think me a fool; you
cannot think me a more egregious ass than I now think myself; but I was
absolutely certain she was mine; so sure that, when she came, and we
were alone together in the house of God, instead of going to her with
the anxious haste of suppliant and lover, I called her to me at the
chancel step as if I were indeed her husband and had the right to bid
her come. She came, and, just as a sweet formality before taking her to
me, I asked for her answer. It was this: 'I cannot marry a mere boy.'"

Garth's voice choked in his throat on the last word. His head was bowed
in his hands. He had reached the point where most things stopped for
him; where all things had ceased forever to be as they were before.

The room seemed strangely silent. The eager voice had poured out into
it such a flow of love and hope and longing; such a revealing of a soul
in which the true love of beauty had created perpetual youth; of a
heart held free by high ideals from all playing with lesser loves, but
ris