aturated themselves in the art and poetry of Love. No, they
were not neurotics. They were sane and healthy, and they were artists.
But they had accomplished the impossible. They had achieved deathless
desire.

"And I? I saw much of them and their everlasting miracle of Love. I
puzzled and wondered, and then one day--"

Carquinez broke off abruptly and asked, "Have you ever read, 'Love's
Waiting Time'?"

I shook my head.

"Page wrote it--Curtis Hidden Page, I think. Well, it was that bit of
verse that gave me the clue. One day, in the window-seat near the big
piano--you remember how she could play? She used to laugh, sometimes,
and doubt whether it was for them I came, or for the music. She called
me a 'music-sot' once, a 'sound-debauchee.' What a voice he had! When
he sang I believed in immortality, my regard for the gods grew almost
patronizing and I devised ways and means whereby I surely could outwit
them and their tricks.

"It was a spectacle for God, that man and woman, years married, and
singing love-songs with a freshness virginal as new-born Love himself,
with a ripeness and wealth of ardour that young lovers can never know.
Young lovers were pale and anaemic beside that long-married pair. To
see them, all fire and flame and tenderness, at a trembling distance,
lavishing caresses of eye and voice with every action, through every
silence--their love driving them toward each other, and they withholding
like fluttering moths, each to the other a candle-flame, and revolving
each about the other in the mad gyrations of an amazing orbit-flight!
It seemed, in obedience to some great law of physics, more potent than
gravitation and more subtle, that they must corporeally melt each
into each there before my very eyes. Small wonder they were called the
wonderful lovers.

"I have wandered. Now to the clue. One day in the window-seat I found
a book of verse. It opened of itself, betraying long habit, to 'Love's
Waiting Time.' The page was thumbed and limp with overhandling, and
there I read:--

"'So sweet it is to stand but just apart,
To know each other better, and to keep
The soft, delicious sense of two that touch...

O love, not yet!... Sweet, let us keep our love
Wrapped round with sacred mystery awhile,
Waiting the secret of the coming years,
That come not yet, not yet... sometime...
not yet...

Oh, yet a little while our love may