hey understood him and knew what he felt--what he had no
words with which to tell any one, if he had wished to tell it.

For he who loves and is little loved, or not at all, has no friend, be
he of high estate or low, beyond nature, the deep-bosomed, the
bountiful, the true; and on her he may lean, trusting, and know that he
will not be betrayed. And in time her language will be his. But she will
be heard alone when she speaks with him, and without rival, with the
full right of a woman who gives all her love and asks for a man's soul
in return, recking little of all the world besides. But not all know how
kind she is, how merciful and how sweet. For she does not heal broken
hearts. She takes them as they are into her own, with all the memory and
all the sin, perhaps, and all the bitter sorrow which is the reward of
faith and faithlessness alike. She takes them all, and holds them kindly
in her own breast, as she has taken the torn limbs of martyred saints
and tortured sinners and has softly turned them all into a fragrant
dust. And though the ashes of the heart be very bitter, they are after
all but dust, which cannot feel of itself any more. Yet there may be
something left behind, in the place where it lived and was broken and
died, which is not wholly bad, though there be little good in this
earth where there is no heart.

Moreover, nature is a silent mistress to all but those who love her, and
she tells no tales as men and women do, and forgets none of the secrets
which are told to her, for they are our treasures--treasures of love and
of hate, of sweetness and of poison, which we lay up in her keeping when
we are alone with her, sure that we shall find again all we have given
up if we require it of her. But as the years blossom, bloom, and fade in
their quick succession, the day will come when we shall ask of her only
the balm and be glad to leave the poison hidden, and to forget how we
would have used it in old days--when we shall ask her only to give us
the memory of a dear and gentle hand--dear still but no longer kind--of
the voice that was once a harmony, and whose harsh discord is almost
music still--of the hour when love was twofold, stainless and supreme.
Those things we shall ask of her and she, in her wonderful tenderness,
will give them to us again--in dreams, waking or sleeping, in the sunlit
silence of lonely places, in soft nights when the southern sea is still,
in the greater loneliness of the storm,