I choked down the foolish rejoinder and
endeavored to look as wise as if my head had been ballasted with the
weight of a patriarch's wisdom instead of ballooning about like a kite
run wild.

"I think I know all your secrets."

"Oh!" A man usually has some secrets he would rather not share; and
though I had not swung the full tether of wild west freedom--thanks
solely to her, not to me--I trembled at recollection of the passes that
come to every man's life when he has been near enough the precipice to
know the sensation of falling without going over.

"You talked incessantly of Miriam and Mr. Hamilton and Father Holland."

"And what did I say about Frances?"

"You said things about Frances that made her tremble."

"Tremble? What a brute, and you waiting on me day and----"

"Hush," she broke in. "Tremble because I am just a woman and not an
angel, just a woman and not a star. We women are mortals just as you men
are. Sometimes we're fools as well as mortals, just as you men are; but
I don't think we're knaves quite so often, because we're denied the
opportunity and hedged about and not tempted."

As she gently stripped away the pretty hypocrisies with which lovers
delude themselves and lay up store for disappointment, I began to
discount that old belief about truth and knowledge rendering a woman
mannish and arrogant and assertive.

"You men marry women, expecting them to be angels, and very often the
angel's highest ambition is to be considered a doll. Then your hope goes
out and your faith----"

"But, Frances," I cried, "if any sensible man had his choice of an
angel and a fair, good woman----"

"Be sure to say fair, or he'd grumble because he hadn't a doll," she
laughed.

"No levity! If he had choice of angels and stars and a good woman, he'd
choose the woman. The star is mighty far away and cold and steely. The
angel's a deal too perfect to know sympathy with faults and blunders. I
tell you, Little Statue, life is only moil and toil, unless love
transmutes the base metal of hard duty into the pure gold of unalloyed
delight."

"That's why I tremble. I must do more than angel or star! Oh, Rufus, if
I can only live up to what you think I am--and you can live up to what I
think you are, life will be worth living."

"That's love's leverage," said I.

Then there was silence; for the sun had set and the father was no longer
reading. Shadows deepened into twilight, and twilight into gloaming. And
it was th