m with patience so
long as they talked of their to-morrows. Should they sometimes dwell
wistfully on their own yesterdays, they could too plainly see how long
the story seemed.

_Telle est la vie!_ as James Mesurier said, and, that being so, no
wonder life is a sad business. Better perhaps be childless and retain
one's own personal hopes and fears for life, than be so relegated to
history in the very zenith of one's days. If only this younger
generation at the door were always, as it assumes, stronger and better
than its elder! but, though the careless assumption that it is so is
somewhat general, history alone shows how false and impudent the
assumption often is. Too often genius itself must submit to the silly
presumption of its noisy and fatuous children, and it is the young fool
who too often knocks imperiously at the door of wise and active
middle age.

That all this is inevitable makes it none the less sad. The young
Mesuriers were neither fools nor hard of heart; and sometimes, in
moments of sympathy, their parents would be revealed to them in sudden
lights of pathos and old romance. They would listen to some old
love-affair of their mother's as though it had been their own, or go out
of their way to make their father tell once more the epic of the great
business over which he presided, and which, as he conceived it, was
doubtless a greater poem than his son would ever write. Yet still even
in such genuine sympathy, there was a certain imaginative effort to be
made. The gulf between the generations, however hidden for the moment,
was always there.

Yet, after all, James and Mary Mesurier possessed an incorruptible
treasure, which their children had neither given nor could take away. To
regard them as without future would be a shallow observation,--for love
has always a future, however old in mortal years it may have grown; and
as they grew older, their love seemed to grow stronger. Involuntarily
they seemed to draw closer together, as by an instinct of
self-preservation. Their love had been before their children; were they
to be spared, it would still be the same love, sweeter by trial, when
their children had passed from them. In this love had been wise for
them. Some parents love their children so unwisely that they forget to
love each other; and, when the children forsake them, are left
disconsolate. One has heard young mothers say that now their boy has
come, their husbands may take a second place; and of