uble," pursued Trent, "there were five
years between us."

"My dear boy," she laughed merrily, "there was all eternity."

His bitterness, he felt, grew heavily upon him while he watched her. A
new beauty had passed into her face; the mystery of a thousand lives was
in her look, in her gestures, in her voice; and she appeared to him not
as herself alone, but as the embodied essence of all former loves of
which he had dreamed--of all the enchanting dead women of whom the poets
wrote. Then he thought of Arnold Kemper, with his exhausted emotions,
his superficial cleverness, his engrossing middle-age, and especially of
his approaching baldness. Was love, after all, he questioned, only a
re-quickened memory in particular brain cells as modern scientists
believed? Was physical heredity, in truth, the fulfilling of the law of
life? and was the soul merely a series of vibrations by which matter
lived and moved?

All the way home his angry scepticism boiled over in his thoughts, and
at the luncheon table, a little later, he met his mother's placid
enquiries with an explosion of boyish despair.

"There's no use trying to persuade me--I can't eat," he said.

"But, my dear son, I fear you'll work yourself into an illness,"
returned Mrs. Trent, with her unshaken calm.

"I don't care," replied the young man desperately, "whether I die now or
later, it is all the same."

"I suppose really it is," admitted his mother; but she added after a
pause in which she had dipped mildly into a philosophic curiosity, "The
way being in love effects one has always seemed to me the very strangest
thing in life. I remember your uncle Channing lived exclusively on
onions for a whole month after Mattie Godwin refused his offer. Why he
selected onions I could never explain," she concluded, "unless it was
that he had never been able to endure the taste of them, and he seemed
bent upon making himself as miserable as it was possible to be."

While she went on placidly eating her hashed chicken, Trent tossed off a
glass or two of claret, which he was perfectly aware, taken on his empty
stomach, would immediately produce a racking headache. Since his passion
was not sincere, it occurred to him that it might at least become
dramatic; but he saw presently, with aggrieved surprise, that the
impression made upon his mother by his violent behavior was far slighter
than he had brought himself to expect. When next she spoke her thoughts
appeared to have str