eenth-century clock where
the crystal water fell with the passing moments. She looked at him as he
stood there, powerfully built, strong, the light of his feeling and of
his introspection kindling in his eyes and on his brow. It had been
three o'clock when he began his story. The afternoon grew paler, the
fire died down to ashes on the little hearth. He took a cigarette from
his pocket, lit it and stood smoking a few moments. Then he went in his
imagination to Albany and carried his hearer with him, and he began to
speak of Molly. He waited for a moment before laying bare to her his
intimate life. As he turned and met her eyes, he said--

"I do not know how to tell you this. You must listen as well as you can.
It is life, you know, and there are many kinds."

Antony, absorbed in his speech, forgot her entirely. He told her of
Molly Shannon with a tenderness that would have moved any woman. When
he closed the chapter of his married life, with his last words a silence
fell, and he saw that she was moved beyond what he had dreamed she would
be. He went back to her, waited a moment, then sat down and put his arm
around her.

"That is my past," he murmured. "Can you forget what there is in it of
defeat and forget its sorrow?"

She kissed him and murmured: "I love you the better for it. It seems you
have come to me through thorny ways, Antony. Perhaps I can make you
forget them."

He did not tell her that she would. Even in this moment, when she was in
his arms, he knew that in her there would be no such oblivion for him.
The marks were too deep upon him. He felt them now. With what he had
been saying, there came back to him a sense of the tremendous burden he
had borne when poor, a sense of the common burden we all bear and which
in the heart of the poet nothing ever entirely lifts.

"Listen," he said urgently and with a certain solemnity. "Any other man
would speak to you about nothing but love. I can do it some day perhaps
too easily, but not now, for this is our beginning and between us both
there must be nothing to conceal." He thought she started a little, and
said hastily: "I mean, nothing for our souls to hide. What I have told
you is my life, but it does not end there. I adore my work. I am a
worker born, I don't know how much of one, but I must give my time and
my talent to it."

"I know, I know," she breathed. "Do you think I don't realize it,
Antony? Do you think I don't adore you for it? Why, it is part o