whatsoever. But you've got an 'imagination' for this make-believe
girl--heaven help you!--and an 'imagination' is a great, wild, seething,
insatiate tongue of fire that, thwarted once and for all in its original
desire to gorge itself with realities, will turn upon you body and soul,
and lick up your crackling fancy like so much kindling wood--and sear
your common sense, and scorch your young wife's happiness. Nothing but
Cornelia herself will ever make you want--Cornelia. But the other girl,
the unknown girl--why she's the face in the clouds, she's the voice in
the sea; she's the glow of the sunset; she's the hush of the June
twilight! Every summer breeze, every winter gale, will fan the embers!
Every thumping, twittering, twanging pulse of an orchestra, every--. Oh,
Stanton, I say, it isn't the ghost of the things that are dead that will
ever come between you and Cornelia. There never yet was the ghost of any
lost thing that couldn't be tamed into a purring household pet.
But--the--ghost--of--a--thing--that--you've--never--yet--found? _That_,
I tell you, is a very different matter!"

Pounding at his heart, and blazing in his cheeks, the insidious
argument, the subtle justification, that had been teeming in Stanton's
veins all the week, burst suddenly into speech.

"But I gave Cornelia the _chance_ to be 'all the world' to me," he
protested doggedly, "and she didn't seem to care a hang about it!
Great Scott, man! Are you going to call a fellow unfaithful because
he hikes off into a corner now and then and reads a bit of Browning,
for instance, all to himself--or wanders out on the piazza some night
all sole alone to stare at the stars that happen to bore his wife to
extinction?"

"But you'll never be able to read Browning again 'all by yourself',"
taunted the Doctor. "Whether you buy it fresh from the presses or
borrow it stale and old from a public library, you'll never find
another copy as long as you live that doesn't smell of cinnamon roses.
And as to 'star-gazing' or any other weird thing that your wife
doesn't care for--you'll never go out alone any more into dawns or
darknesses without the very tingling conscious presence of a wonder
whether the 'other girl' _would_ have cared for it!"

"Oh, shucks!" said Stanton. Then, suddenly his forehead puckered up.
"Of course I've got a worry," he acknowledged frankly. "Any fellow's
got a worry who finds himself engaged to be married to a girl who
isn't keen enough a