r from
there. Then she showed me Gerald's ring that she'd been wearing on a
chain round her neck where I wouldn't see it, and she talked about
Gerald's wonderfulness. She's perfectly wrapped up in him. All I hope is
he appreciates it."

"His inducing her to elope with him would seem to indicate some warmth
of feeling on his part. The suggestion can hardly have come from her."

"You're right. I guess it's as bad with him as with her. She talked
about the wonderfulness of his love, such as she never could have
believed, and never could deserve. She said she could be happy with
Gerald in a garret that let the snow leak in. Oh, they're both crazy.
What do you think she gave as one reason for this haste? 'Life is
short,' she said, 'and love is long!' Gerald must have said it to her
before she said it to me, but what do you think of it? 'Life is short
and love is long!'"

"Do you mean"--asked Leslie, with the least touch of severity,--"that I
ought to share in a cynical view of that saying? I can't, my dear
Estelle. There are my father and mother, you know. In their quiet way
they bear out the idea that love may be as long as life."

"Yes, of course," said Estelle hurriedly, with a faint air of shame. "My
father and mother, too, make a united couple."

"My belief is that when two people marry who are in love as they ought
to be, and who in addition are good--By good I think I mean people--"
Leslie, with her look of wisdom beyond her years, paused to take a
survey of life, "--people who have a sense of the other person's rights,
and, as a matter of heart, not principle, feel the other's claims just a
little more strongly than their own--in the case of such people, when
the passion they marry on dies out with their growing older, as we
generally see it do, something takes its place that deserves the name of
love every bit as much."

"Aurora is good," said Estelle, from her soul. "You would never know how
good unless you had stood in need of kindness."

"Gerald is good, too," said Leslie, with an effect of more impartiality
but no less positiveness. "He would disdain to be anything else."

"What is wrong with me is that I'm selfish, I guess," said Estelle,
looking contrite, "and don't like having to give her up to him, after
all the beautiful things we'd planned together. What I ought to feel is
nothing but thankfulness for her having such a chance of happiness, and
then thankfulness for all she did, trying to make up f