an the successes of
others. But he had never really known the worst of himself until now.
For the worst of him was that he had not recognized the true love of
his life when it came to him. Those early fancies of his for girls
whom he deemed too poor to marry--what had they been but fancies
indeed? He had despised himself once or twice for not committing
himself, but what was the offense of failing a mere fancy compared to
the offense of not recognizing the one true love when it was in his
life? He would have had courage enough to follow it to the world's
end, in sharpest poverty and hardship, but he had so sheltered himself
from any mischance in love that he had not known love when it came.
Blind fool that he was, he had not known it when it came!

Even now he could not tell just when it had come. Looking back along
the years, it seemed to him to have been there always, for every memory
of Sheila, since her little girlhood, took him by the throat.

He saw her as he--and Ted!--had seen her one April day when she was but
twelve years old; a slender, black-haired, dreaming-eyed child, lying
upon the pale, spring grass and looking up into the flowering
cherry-tree branches above her head; a child who was herself an
embodied poem, so akin she was to all of April's magic, to the spring's
lovely miracles. He saw her, too, in his class-room, eager, earnest,
exquisitely responsive to every perception, every thought of his own; a
little girl while he was already a man, and yet his comrade, his
comrade in every phase of life had he but discerned and willed it! He
saw her as a young girl, with her pure eyes and her generous mouth and
her sweet, slender throat; a being still untouched by life, but
beautifully ready, touchingly desirous for life's shaping hands. And
he saw her as she had been yesterday, walking by his side, the woman at
last--yet strangely immature, incomplete. He had thought her immature
and incomplete because she had not developed her gift. Now there came
to him another thought--bred of all those flashing pictures of her in
which she seemed so much his own--the thought that she was incomplete
because she had not really loved.

It was impossible that she should really love Ted; Ted who could give
neither comprehension nor response to the greater part of her nature.
It was impossible! He had felt that at the time of her marriage; he
remembered now how resentfully! He had felt it when Mrs. Caldwell had