h other, surely we should recollect it."

Then she blushed, suddenly realizing that her words implied, perhaps,
more than she had meant. I did not pay the obvious compliment. Those
blue eyes and something in their expression moved me strangely; but I
could not tell why. When I said good-bye to her that night, I asked to
be allowed to call.

She assented.

That was the beginning of a very beautiful courtship, which gave a
colour to life, a music to existence, a meaning to every slightest
sensation.

And was it love that laid to sleep recollection, that sang a lullaby to
awakening horror, and strewed poppies over it till it sighed itself into
slumber? Was it love that drowned my mind in deep and charmed waters,
binding the strange powers that every mind possesses in flowery garlands
stronger than any fetters of iron? Was it love that, calling up dreams,
alienated my thoughts from their search after reality?

I hardly know. I only know that I grew to love Margot, and only looked
for love in her blue eyes, not for any deed of the past that might be
mirrored there.

And I made her love me.

She gave her child's heart to my keeping with a perfect confidence
that only a perfect affection could engender. She did love me then. No
circumstances of to-day can break that fact under their hammers. She
did love me, and it is the knowledge that she did which gives so much of
fear to me now.

For great changes in the human mind are terrible. As we realize them we
realize the limitless possibilities of sinister deeds that lie hidden in
every human being. A little child that loves a doll can become an old,
crafty, secret murderer. How horrible!

And perhaps it is still more horrible to think that, while the human
envelope remains totally unchanged, every word of the letter within may
become altered, and a message of peace fade into a sentence of death.

Margot's face is the same face now as it was when I married
her--scarcely older, certainly not less beautiful. Only the expression
of the eyes has changed.

For we were married. After a year of love-making, which never tired
either of us, we elected to bind ourselves, to fuse the two into one.

We went abroad for the honeymoon, and, instead of shortening it to the
fashionable fortnight, we travelled for nearly six months, and were
happy all the time.

Boredom never set in. Margot had a beautiful mind as well as a beautiful
face. She softened me through my affection. The c