w, but I cut argument short
and we had a wedding.

Now I didn't know I was drawing a prize, yet that was what I did
draw. Within the twelvemonth I became her worshiper; and ours
was the dearest and perfectest comradeship that ever was. People
talk about beautiful friendships between two persons of the same
sex. What is the best of that sort, as compared with the friendship
of man and wife, where the best impulses and highest ideals of
both are the same? There is no place for comparison between
the two friendships; the one is earthly, the other divine.

In my dreams, along at first, I still wandered thirteen centuries
away, and my unsatisfied spirit went calling and harking all up
and down the unreplying vacancies of a vanished world. Many a
time Sandy heard that imploring cry come from my lips in my sleep.
With a grand magnanimity she saddled that cry of mine upon our
child, conceiving it to be the name of some lost darling of mine.
It touched me to tears, and it also nearly knocked me off my feet,
too, when she smiled up in my face for an earned reward, and played
her quaint and pretty surprise upon me:

"The name of one who was dear to thee is here preserved, here made
holy, and the music of it will abide alway in our ears. Now
thou'lt kiss me, as knowing the name I have given the child."

But I didn't know it, all the same. I hadn't an idea in the
world; but it would have been cruel to confess it and spoil her
pretty game; so I never let on, but said:

"Yes, I know, sweetheart--how dear and good it is of you, too!
But I want to hear these lips of yours, which are also mine, utter
it first--then its music will be perfect."

Pleased to the marrow, she murmured:

"HELLO-CENTRAL!"

I didn't laugh--I am always thankful for that--but the strain
ruptured every cartilage in me, and for weeks afterward I could
hear my bones clack when I walked. She never found out her mistake.
The first time she heard that form of salute used at the telephone
she was surprised, and not pleased; but I told her I had given
order for it: that henceforth and forever the telephone must
always be invoked with that reverent formality, in perpetual honor
and remembrance of my lost friend and her small namesake. This
was not true. But it answered.

Well, during two weeks and a half we watched by the crib, and in
our deep solicitude we were unconscious of any world outside of
that sick-room. Then our reward came: the center of t