ving once loved, he could never love again.
He never met a marriageable woman, no matter how attractive or willing
she might be to receive his attentions, without feeling the presence of
a certain barrier of contrast to an ideal embedded in his tragic past.
There was a vast store of love and tenderness in him, and this he poured
out on his foster-sister. He was a natural man and yielded to sensual
temptations, but always with the after-result of feeling vaguely soiled
and lowered, and was in continual strife with his passions. To-day they
were conquered, to-morrow they held temporary sway. And there was a
rebuke, always a rebuke which no reasoning could set aside--a rebuke
rising out of the mystic sanctity of the short union between him and his
bride. "Tilly!" The very name crept upon him unawares as from the
exquisite mental pictures he was always trying to suppress. "Tilly!" He
caught himself applying it to Dora, a slip of the tongue, which, better
than anything else, revealed to him the psychic bonds between him and a
personality lost to him forever. Once Dora asked him if he thought, by
any chance, that Tilly might have died. He started, reflected for a
moment, and then answered in a way that was a surprise even to himself.
"No, she's living," he said. "If she were dead I'd feel it."

"That is no criterion to go by," answered Dora, who had become quite
religious and was now a member of the Methodist Church. "Do you know
what Harold would say about that?"

"Harold might say a lot of absurd things about it"--John smiled
indulgently--"but he is no criterion, either."

"Well, I'll tell you what he'd say, and it is my opinion, too," the girl
went on. "He'd say that the very intuitive feeling you say you
have--your firm confidence of her existence, is due to the fact that she
has passed from this plane of life, is now on another, and that she is
always with you in spirit because she loved you once, still loves you,
and wants to protect you. Don't you see how pretty that is, brother
John? She has become, as Harold would say, your guardian angel, your
very conscience. When you are tempted to do wrong she restrains you; and
when you actually do something wrong she has a way of rebuking you
through your intuition."

This argument displeased John, as all such theories did. He claimed,
with many of his rather materialistic friends, that to believe in a
blissful life to come only rendered one less useful in the present, and