d was up without. He glanced at his fire.
Already the kindlings were settling into glowing heaps beneath the
logs, a good start on a fresh pile of ashes. He snuggled more
comfortably into his chair and began once more the deathless poem.

The clock ticked steadily; the wind sent crashing down the limb of an
elm tree outside and shrieked exultingly; a log settled into the fire
with a hiss and crackle of sparks. But he heard nothing. Presently he
laid the book aside, for the poem was finished, and looked into the
fire. It was sometimes a favorite question of his to inquire who ate
Madeline's feast, a point which Keats leaves in doubt; but he did not
ask it to-night.

"Yes, it was ages long ago," he said at length. "Ages long ago!"

Then he leaned forward, poking the fire meditatively, and added:
"Steam heat in Madeline's chamber? Impossible! But there might have
been just such another fire as this!"

And was it a sudden thought, "like a full-blown rose," making "purple
riot" in his breast, too, or was it simply the leap of the firelight,
which caused his face to flush?

"I wonder where they are now?" he whispered. "'They are together in
the arms of death,' a later poet says. But surely the world has not so
far 'progressed' that they do not live somewhere still."

Then he recalled a visit he once made to a young doctor in a fine old
New-England village. The doctor was not long out of college, and he
had brought his bride to this little town, to an old house rich in
tiny window panes, uneven floors and memories. Great fireplaces
supplied the heat for the doctor and his wife, as it had done for the
occupants who looked forth from the windows to see the soldiery go by
on their way to join Washington at the siege of Boston. And when the
Man Above the Square came on his visit he found in the fireplace which
warmed the low-studded living room, that was library and drawing room
as well, a heap of ashes more than a foot high, on which the great
cordwood sticks roared merrily.

The doctor and his wife, sitting down before the blaze, pointed
proudly to this heap of ashes, and the doctor said, "I brought Alice
to this house a year ago, on the day of our wedding, and we kindled a
fire here, on the bare hearth. Since then not a speck of ashes has
been removed, except little bits from the front when the carpet was
invaded. That pile of ashes is the witness to our year-long
honeymoon."

Then Alice smiled fondly into the rosy gl