y have one single hour to ask thee what thou didst learn about
this awful mystery in those lonely years of struggle! If I could only
tell thee of my penitence, of my admiration, my love! But it is too
late--too late."

With this despairing cry on his lips, he flung himself upon the grave,
buried his face in the green turf and burst into a convulsive passion of
tears, such tears as come once or twice, perhaps, in the lives of most
men, when they are passing through the awful years of adjustment to the
incomprehensible and apparently chaotic experiences of existence.

Like a thunderstorm, these convulsions clear the atmosphere and give
relief to the strained tension of the soul. At length, when his emotion
had spent itself in long-drawn sighs, David rose in a calm and tender
frame of mind, plucked a bunch of violets from the grave and reluctantly
turned away.

On foot, and leading his horse, he entered a quiet and secluded path
which led past the rear of the farm. He had not consciously determined
what he should do next; but his heart impelled him irresistibly toward
that little bridge where he had encountered Pepeeta on his return from
the lumber camp. It was at that place and that hour, perhaps, that he
had passed through the deepest experience of his whole life, for it was
there that the full power of the beauty of the woman in whom he had met
his destiny had burst upon him, and it was there that for the first time
he had consciously surrendered himself to those rich emotions which love
enkindles in the soul.

Perhaps our spiritual enjoyments are capable of an ever-increasing
development and intensity; but those pleasures that belong to the
earthly life and are excited by the things of time and sense, however
often they may recur, by an inviolable law of nature attain their climax
in some one single experience, just as there is in the passage of a star
across the sky a single climactic moment, and in the life of a rose an
instant when it reaches its most transcendent beauty. They all attain
their zenith and then begin to wane; that one brilliant but transitory
instant of perfect bliss can no more be recalled than the passing stroke
of a bell, the vanished glory of a sunset, or the last sigh of a dying
friend; and many of the vainest and most unsatisfying struggles of life
are expended in the effort to reproduce that one evanescent and
forevermore impossible ecstasy.

Possibly David hoped that he could live that pe