by the way I judge you have not seen,
will leave her a few thousands; but meanwhile he is a fixture--will not
leave her or let her leave him, which is a misfortune since in a social
way he is simply impossible. No sort of match for you, Roberts. Cut and
run while there is time; that's my advice to you, given in the most
friendly spirit."

"Thank you. As I have but just met Miss Taylor, don't you think such
advice is a little premature?"

"No, I don't. She is a woman who must be loved or left; that's all.
You've heard me."

Did Carleton Roberts heed these words? No. What man in the thrall of his
first romance ever did.

"You love me, Ermentrude?"

"I love you, Carleton."

"For a day, for a month or for a year?" he smiled.

"Forever," she answered.

"That's a long time," he murmured, with his eyes on a little clock
hanging in the shop window before which they had stopped in one of their
infrequent walks together. "A long time! That foolish little clock will
beat out the hours of its short life and go the way of all things, before
we shall hardly have entered upon the soul's 'forever.'"

"That clock will last our lifetime, Carleton. Afterward, love will not be
counted by hours."

As she said this she turned her face his way and he saw it in its full
flower with the light of heaven upon it. In later years he may have
forgotten the emotions of that moment, but they were the purest, the
freest from earthly stain that he was ever destined to know.

"I will love you _forever_," he whispered. "That little clock shall be my
witness." And he drew her into the shop.

* * * * *

"Cuckoo!"

Ermentrude glanced up; the clock hung on her wall.

"Oh," she murmured, "each hour it will speak to me of him and his words,"
then softly, like one adream in Paradise:

"I love but thee,
And thee will I love to eternity."

Such was the event to her. What was it to him? Let us see:

A hotel room--a view of Pilatus, but with its top lost in enveloping
clouds.

Seated before it with pen in hand above a sheet of paper, Carleton
Roberts eyes these clouds but does not see them; he is hunting in his
brain for words and they do not come. Why? His mother's name is on the
page and he has only to write that she has been quite correct in her
judgment as to the unfitness of the marriage he had had in mind:--that
youth should mate with youth and that if she could see the glorious young
girl w