side with the
flowers in our Earth gardens. Salt tears mingle with our laughter; Night
comes down in blotting darkness--perhaps in drenching rain,--at the close
of every short, bright day of sunshine. But Life gone by, its hopes and
fears and sorrows laid with our once-beating hearts in the good grey dust
to rest, I shall meet with you again, in the Land where dreams come true.

"The Land Where Dreams Come True." That was the title of the song and its
refrain, and somehow it caught the listeners by the heart strings, making
the women sob aloud, and wringing bright sudden drops from the bold eyes
of rough, strong, hardy men. You are to remember how the people stood:
that scarcely one was there that had not lost brother or sister, mother or
husband, child or friend or comrade since the beginning of the siege; and
thus the touch of Nature made itself felt, and the simple pathos went home
to the sore quick. They sang the refrain with her, fervently, and when the
song was done, they sat in touched silence but one moment--and then the
applause came down. As it fell upon her like a wall, she screamed in
terror, and ran away behind the scene, and was found by W. Keyse a minute
later, sobbing hysterically, with her head jammed into an angle of the
wall of un-plastered brick-work.

None saw. He put his arms manfully about the waistline of the flowery
blouse.

"Oh, let me go! Oh, what a wicked, wicked girl I've bin! Oh, it's all come
over me on a sudden, like a flood! Don't touch me--I'm not good enough!
Oh! how can you, can you?"

She sobbed the words out, and W. Keyse had kissed her. He did not get
another utterance of her that night. She parted from him in tingling
silence. His own uneasy sense of faithlessness to One immeasurably
beloved, to whom he had pledged inviolable and eternal fidelity, nearly
prompted him to ask her not to up and tell. But he manfully kept silence.

The worst of one kiss of that kind is that it begets the desire for others
like it. She had turned her mouth to his in that whirling, breathless
moment, and it was small, and warm, and clung. He tried to shake off the
remembrance, but it haunted persistently.

He knew he had behaved like a regular beast--a low cur, in fact. To kiss
one girl and mean it for another was, in the Keysian Code of morals, to be
guilty of a baseness. The worst of it was that he knew, given the chance,
he would do the same thing again.

For he could not shake off the memory