at each other in the terrible recognition that brings souls
almost too close.

"You are a great woman, my dear," said Osmond. He rose and stood before
her. "Look at me. I hate my body. Could you love it?"

"I do love it," said the woman. "And I love your soul. And I am ashamed
to think we can know the things we have known and then think of the
bodies we live in. Grannie believes in immortal life. I believe in it
too, since I have known you."

"There are a good many hours, my dear, when we forget immortal life. The
world goes hard with us. In those times, shall you look at me and hate
me?"

She was smiling at him through tears.

"I shall look at you and love you, stupid!" she said. "Oh, how little
men know!"

"And then," he was continuing, in his bitter honesty, "I am a laboring
man. I told Peter you were a terrible Parisian."

She shook her head.

"You don't quite know what you are, Osmond. There's a good deal of
grannie in you. Perhaps that is one of the things I love. You work with
your hands. Everything is possible to you, every kind of splendid thing,
because you have not been spoiled by artificial life, the ambitions of
it, the poor, mean hypocrisies. Strange that I should be talking about
labor!"

"Why strange?"

"Because I hated the mention of it while my father lived. But now I seem
to have gone back to my old feeling of a kind of pity for them all,--the
ones that work blindly out of the light,--I see them as Ivan Gorof saw
them, that great sea of the oppressed."

"But not every workingman is oppressed."

"No, no! Not here. But in other countries where they are surging and
trying to have their ignorant way. And they are no more to be pitied
than the rich. And I keep wishing for them, not money and power and
leisure, such as the rich have, but something better, something I wish
the rich had, too."

"The heart that sees God, grannie would say."

"Maybe grannie would pray for it, Osmond. Maybe I could sing it--I hope
to sing now--maybe you could put it into the land and bring it out in
flowers."

"That's poetry!" said Osmond. He was smiling at her unconscious way of
showing him how lovely she was and how loving. "I am going now, dear. I
am going to take your present home carefully and look at it alone."

She knitted wistful brows a moment. Then she too smiled.

"You will see how valuable it is when you look at it," she said. "It
will shine so."

He had risen and stood before her, looking at