ssion of which I regret to find
your mother incapable--that endures unchanged until the end of life."

"I am so glad you think so, Messire Florian," she answered demurely.

"And do you not think so, mademoiselle?"

"How should I know," she asked him, "as yet?" He noted she had
incredibly long lashes.

"Thrice happy is he that convinces you!" says Florian. And about them,
who were young in the world's recaptured youth, spring triumphed with an
ageless rural pageant, and birds cried to their mates. He noted the red
brevity of her lips and their probable softness.

Meanwhile the elder women regarded each other.

"It is the season of May. They are young and they are together. Poor
children!" said Dame Melicent. "Youth cries to youth for the toys of
youth, and saying, 'Lo! I cry with the voice of a great god!'"

"Still," said Madame Adelaide, "Puysange is a good fief."

But Florian heeded neither of them as he stood there by the sunlit
stream, in which no drop of water retained its place for a moment, and
which yet did not alter in appearance at all. He did not heed his elders
for the excellent reason that Sylvie de Nointel was about to speak, and
he preferred to listen to her. For this girl, he knew, was lovelier than
any other person had ever been since Eve first raised just such
admiring, innocent, and venturesome eyes to inspect what must have
seemed to her the quaintest of all animals, called man. So it was with a
shrug that Florian remembered how he had earlier fancied other women for
one reason or another; since this, he knew, was the great love of his
life, and a love which would endure unchanged as long as his life
lasted.

THE WRISTS ON THE DOOR[10]

[Note 10: Copyright, 1919, by The Ridgway Company. Copyright, 1920,
by Horace Fish.]

BY HORACE FISH

From _Everybody's Magazine_

Between his leather easy-chair at one end of his drawing-room and the
wall with his wife's portrait at the other, Henry Montagu was pacing in
a state of agitation such as he had never experienced in his fifty years
of life. The drawing-room was no longer "theirs." It was his--and the
portrait's. The painting was of a girl who was not more beautiful in
radiance of feature and lovable contour of body than the woman a
generation older who had died two months ago.

Suddenly he stopped short in the middle of the room, his hands in his
pockets. "My God!" he cried.

Then he shut his teeth on the words as sharply and pass