ve
kept me out of your mind in order to worship her. Yet you have known
I was there--for all you would not know. No one else will ever be so
intimate with you as I am. We have quarrelled together, wept together,
jested happily and jested bitterly. You have spared me not at all.
Pitiless and cruel you have been to me. You have reckoned up all my
faults against me as though they were sins. You have treated me at times
unlovingly--never was lover treated so unlovingly as you have sometimes
treated me. And yet I have your love--as no other woman can ever have
it. Even now when you are wildly in love with this girl's freshness and
boldness and cleverness I come into your mind by right and necessity."

"She is different," argued Sir Richmond.

"But you are the same," said the shadow of Martin with Martin's
unsparing return. "Your love has never been a steadfast thing. It comes
and goes like the wind. You are an extravagantly imperfect lover. But
I have learnt to accept you, as people accept the English weather....
Never in all your life have you loved, wholly, fully, steadfastly--as
people deserve to be loved--not your mother nor your father, not your
wife nor your children, nor me, nor our child, nor any living thing.
Pleasant to all of us at times--at times bitterly disappointing. You
do not even love this work of yours steadfastly, this work to which you
sacrifice us all in turn. You do not love enough. That is why you have
these moods and changes, that is why you have these lassitudes. So it is
you are made....

"And that is why you must not take this brave young life, so much
simpler and braver than your own, and exalt it--as you can do--and then
fail it, as you will do...."

Sir Richmond's mind and body lay very still for a time.

"Should I fail her?..."

For a time Martin Leeds passed from the foreground of his mind.

He was astonished to think how planless, instinctive and unforeseeing
his treatment of Miss Grammont had been. It had been just a blind drive
to get hold of her and possess her....

Suddenly his passion for her became active in its defence again.

"But is there such a thing as a perfect love? Is YOURS a perfect love,
my dear Martin, with its insatiable jealousy, its ruthless criticism?
Has the world ever seen a perfect lover yet? Isn't it our imperfection
that brings us together in a common need? Is Miss Grammont, after all,
likely to get a more perfect love in all her life than this poor love o