tly what you did," she said. "You were a big
boy and you came up behind my pony and jumped on, frightening us
dreadfully."

"Tried to kiss you, didn't I?"

She laughed: "That was ever a chronic endeavor of your youth."

How pretty she looked. Had it been any other woman he would have
reached over and taken her hand.

"Overpower her, master her, make her love you by force of arms"--his
inner voice said.

He turned to the musing woman beside him and mechanically reached out
his hand. Hers lay on the arm of her chair. The next instant he would
have dropped his upon it and held it there. But as he made the motion
her eyes looked up into his, so passion-free and holy that his own
arm fell by his side.

But the little wave of passion in him only stirred him to his depths.
Ere she knew it or could stop him he was telling her the story of his
love for her. Poetry,--romance,--and with it the strength of
saying,--fell from his lips as naturally as snow from the clouds. He
went into the history of old loves--how, of all loves they are the
greatest--of Jacob who served his fourteen years for Rachel, of the
love of Petrarch, of Dante.

"Do you know Browning's most beautiful poem?" he asked at last. His
voice was tenderly mellow:

"All that I know of a certain star
Is, it can throw (like the angled spar)
Now a dart of red, now a dart of blue;
Till my friends have said they would fain see, too,
My star that dartles the red and the blue!
Then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs furled:
They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it.
What matter to me if their star is a world?
Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it."

"Alice," he said, drawing his chair closer to her, "I know I have no
such life to offer as you would bring to me. The best we men can do
is to do the best we can. We are saved only because there is one
woman we can look to always as our star. There is much of our past
that we all might wish to change, but change, like work, is the law
of life, and we must not always dream."

Quietly he had dropped his hand upon hers. Her own eyes were far
off--they were dreaming. So deep was her dream that she had not
noticed it. Passion practised, as he was, the torch of her hand
thrilled him as with wine; and as with wine was he daring.

"I know where your thoughts have been," he went on.

She looked up with a start and her hand slipped from under his