lways
associate them."

"I am eager to know what impression Miss Wildmere has made."

"I fear this would be true of her, even after she becomes a mature
woman. A man might be almost perishing at her side from mental trouble
of some kind, and, so far from feeling for him and sympathizing, she
wouldn't even know it, and he couldn't make her know it. She would
look at him quietly with her gray eyes as she would at a problem in
the calculus, and with scarcely more desire to understand him, and
with perhaps less power to do so. She would turn from him to a new
dress, a new admirer, or a new phase of amusement, and forget him, and
the fact that he was her husband would not make much difference. Some
deep experience of her own may change her, but I don't know. I fear
another's experience would be like a tragedy without the walls while
she was safe within."

"Oh, Madge, think of a man with a strong, sensitive nature beating his
very heart to death against such pumice-stone callousness!"

"I don't like to think of it," she replied. "Come, I ask with you now
that we forget her as far as possible. She may not disappoint a
man like Arnault. Let them both become shadows in the background of
memory. Here's a level place. Now for a gallop."

When at last they pulled up, Graydon said, "Your horse is awfully
strong and restless to-day."

"Yes; he has not been used enough of late. He'll be quiet before
night, for I am enjoying this so much that I should like to return in
the same way."

"I am delighted to hear you say so. My spirits begin to rise the
moment I am with you, and you are the only woman I ever knew from
whose side I could not go with the feeling, 'Well, some other time
would suit me now.'"

Her laugh rang out so suddenly and merrily that her horse sprang into
a gallop, but she checked him speedily, and thought, with an exultant
thrill, "Graydon now has surely revealed an unmistakable symptom." To
him she said:

"You amuse me immensely. You are almost as outspoken as little Harry,
and, like him, you mistake the impression of the moment for the
immutable."

"Now, that's not fair to me. I've been constant to you. Own up, Madge,
haven't I?"

With a glance and smile which she never gave to others, and rarely to
him, she said:

"I own up. I don't believe a real brother would have been half so
nice.".

"Let the past guarantee the future, then. Shake hands against all
future misunderstandings."

She was scarcely