riendship of a David and a Jonathan, a Karlos and a
Posa; and, where there is a difference of sex, brings about that rarest
wonder of the world, a happy marriage.

Like cleaves to like. He knew she would have loved him. She was his by
right. The same law of attraction which had lifted them at once out of
the dreary flats of ordinary acquaintanceship would have drawn them ever
closer and closer together till they were knit in one. He knew, with a
certainty that nothing could shake, that he could have made her love
him, even as he loved her; unconsciously at first, slowly perhaps--for
the current of strong natures, like that of deep rivers, is sometimes
slow. Still the end would have been the same.

And he had lost her by his own act, by his own heedless folly; her want
of vanity having lent a hand the while to put her beyond his reach
forever.

It was a bitter hour.

And as he sat late into the night beside the fire, that died down to
dust and ashes before his absent eyes, ghosts of other heavy hours,
ghosts of the past, which he had long since buried out of his sight,
came back and would not be denied.

To live much in the past, is a want of faith in the Power that gives the
present. Comparatively few men walk through their lives looking
backward. Women more frequently do so from a false estimate of life
fostered by romantic feeling in youth, which leads them, if the life of
the affections is ended, resolutely to refuse to regard existence in any
other maturer aspect, and to persist in wandering aimlessly forward,
with eyes turned ever on the dim flowery paths of former days.

"Let the dead past bury its dead."

But there comes a time, when the grass has grown over those graves, when
we may do well to go and look at them once more; to stand once again in
that solitary burial-ground, "where," as an earnest man has said, "are
buried broken vows, worn-out hopes, joys blind and deaf, faiths betrayed
or gone astray--lost, lost love; silent spaces where only one mourner
ever comes."

And to the last retrospective of us our dead past yet speaks at times,
and speaks as one having authority.

Such a time had come for Charles now. From the open grave of his love
for Ruth he turned to look at others by which he had stood long ago, in
grief as sharp, but which yet in all its bitterness had never struck as
deep as this.

Memory pointed back to a time twenty years ago, when he had hurried home
through a long summer night