yours, and I know it and feel it, because it is mine also.

'I am weary with my journey, and I am so sad and lonely that I have
scarce the heart to write; but promise me just this one thing: Give me
half an hour of your thoughts each day, and let me know what part of
the day you choose, so that I may think of you at the same time. Do
you believe that any actual communion of the mind is possible in such
conditions? I should like to believe it. How pure, how spiritual, how
exquisite a friendship might exist if it were only so!'

Exactly. And what a quagmire a properly experienced lady may lead a
man into if she so wills! This particular experiment suggested by the
Baroness is singularly successful in the enslaving of the eager, and it
has the great merit of permitting the willing horse to do all the work.
The lover can moon and rhapsodise at a safe distance, and it makes not
a pennyworth of difference to him whether the mistress moons and
rhapsodises also, or whether she is engaged in a flirtation through
another telepathic line, or whether she has a score of different lines
converging upon her all at once.

Paul, of course, most willingly accorded the lady the daily half-hour
demanded. He became persuaded in a very little while that the soul of
Gertrude met his midway, and when she sent him a description of her
little boudoir, so that he might the better realize her in her own
surroundings, he used to float away to Verviers in vision, and sit by
Gertrude in fancy, and hold Gertrude's hand, and express to Gertrude
all his ardours of friendship and esteem--for, of course, it never got
beyond that, or was ever to be permitted to get beyond it--and Gertrude
used to give him vow for vow, all in the range of the highest moral
feeling. It is possible that there are people who might imbibe this
sort of mental liquor and come to no damage by it, but Paul found it
remarkably heady. At first he thought the draught stimulative, but in
a while he began to know that it was enervating. He began to rebel at
himself.

'I am throwing away my manhood for a dream,' he said.

For Gertrude, whose letters were fairly frequent and most sisterly
tender, would hear nothing of Paul's petition that he might be allowed
to visit her--would not even listen to any suggestion that they might
ever meet again in any approach to the happy seclusion and privacy of
the first sweet days.

But Paul Armstrong was feeble in rebellion against himself, and