g it, hurries past and never
recognizes it, but continues to mistake for it prosperity and riches,
noise and laughter, even fame and mere cheap notoriety.

They walked slowly back towards the farm, and again the gods were kind
to them; for they forgot how short their time was, how quickly such
moments fly. Much that they had to say to each other may not be
expressed on paper, neither can any compositor set it up in type.

They were practical enough, however, and as they walked beneath the
snow-clad pines they drew up a scheme of life which was astonishingly
unlike the dreams and aspirations of most lovers. For it was devoid
of selfishness, and they looked for happiness--not in an immediate
gratification of all their desires and an instant fulfilment of their
hopes, but in a mutual faith that should survive all separation and
bridge the longest span of years. Loyalty was to be their watchword.
Loyalty to self, to duty, and to each other.

Wanda did not, like the heroine of a novel, look for a passion that
should stride over every obstacle to its object, that should ignore
duty, which is only another word for honor, and throw down the spectres,
Foresight, Common-sense, Respect, which must arise in the pathway of
that madness, a brief passion. She was content, it seemed, that her
lover should be wise, should be careful for the future, should take her
life into his hands with a sort of quiet mastery as if he had a right
to do so--a right, not to ruin and debase, such as is usually considered
the privilege of that which is called a great passion and admired as
such--but a right to shape, guard, and keep.

Cartoner had not much to say about his own feelings, which, perhaps,
made him rather different from most lovers. He went so far as to
consider the feelings of others and to place them before his own, which,
of course, is quite unusual. And yet the scheme of life which was his
reading of Love, and which Wanda extracted from him that sunny March
morning and pieced together bit by bit in her own decided and conclusive
way, seemed to content her. She seemed to gather from it that he loved
her precisely as she wished to be loved, and that, come what might,
she had already enough to make her life happier than the lives of most
women.

And, of course, they hoped. For they were young, and human, and the
spring was in the air. But their hope was one of those things of which
they could not speak; for it involved knowledge of whi