ul envy in Mr.
Blake's voice. I remember well his saying that God's richest earthly
gift was that of wife and child and hearth.

"Though I speak," he added almost bitterly, "as I might speak of distant
stars, for I have no one of the three," and his lips closed tightly
while he drove his ball with a savage hand.

"You have not wife or child," I said, "but no man who has been sheltered
by your friendship can agree with you about your hearth. It has warmed
my heart too many times when that heart was cold."

"There is no hearth where there is neither wife nor child," he answered
almost passionately. "Hearths are not built with hands. Do you not know,
sir, that if a man would have a fireside he must begin to kindle it when
youth is still throbbing in his heart? From boyhood up he is preparing
it, or else he is quenching it in darkness. Do you know, sir, if I were
a preacher I would burn that into young men's hearts till they would
feel that heaven or hell were all bound up with how they reverence or
despise their future fireside. I would tell them that no man can lay his
hearth in ashes in the hot days of youth, and then build it up again in
the rainy days of age.

"I would tell every wastrel, and every man who is rehearsing hell with
his youthful follies, that he cannot eat his cake and have it. For
hearth and wife and child are not for him. I would tell him that he
cannot breed a cancer in his heart while he is young and cure it with
some pious perfume brewed by the hand of age. I would tell them that
till my lips blistered, and then they should hear of the grace of God
till those same lips were rosy with its healing."

Amazed, I stood and gazed at him, for there was a fearful fascination in
his face. The face of a saint it was, with that warlike peace which only
a battling and victorious life can give, but it had for the time the
half-hunted look of one who trembles at the sound of footsteps he had
hoped were forever still, of one whose soul was overstormed by surging
waves of memory. There is sometimes a dread ghastliness in the thought
that out of the abundance of a man's heart his mouth is speaking, though
he declares it not. It is like the procession of a naked soul; or, to
change the figure, it is like beholding a man unearth some very corpse
he had long sought to hide.

It was his turn to play--ah me! the grim variety of life--and his ball
failed but narrowly of a delicate ambition.

"If I could but have it