Brooke!
how strangely we have drifted together! How much we have learned
about each other! Is Fate so bitter as to make us drift away,
after--after--"

Her voice died away altogether, and she turned her face aside and
bowed down her head.

Brooke looked at her for a moment, and seemed about to take her hand,
but he conquered this impulse and resolutely averted his eyes.

"Don't know, I'm sure," said he, at last, with an affectation of airy
indifference.

"It would take a man with a head as long as a horse to answer such a
question as that. Talbot, lad, you shouldn't plunge so deep into the
mysteries of being."

After this there was another silence, and then Talbot looked up at
Brooke with her deep, dark glance, and began to speak in a calm
voice, which, however, did not fail to thrill through the heart of
Brooke as he listened.

"Brooke," said she, "you have your own way. Your way is to conceal a
most tender and pitying heart under a rough or at least an
indifferent manner--to hide the deepest feeling under a careless
smile, and pretend to be most volatile and flippant when you are most
serious. You can perform heroic actions as though they were the
merest trifles, and lay down your life for a friend with an idle
jest. You make nothing of yourself and all of others. You can suffer,
and pretend that you enjoy it; and when your heart is breaking, you
can force your voice to troll out verses from old songs as though
your chief occupation in life were nonsense, and that alone. And this
is the man," continued Talbot, in a dreamy tone, like that of one
soliloquizing--"this is the man that I found by chance in my
distress; the man that responded to my very first appeal by the offer
of his life; that went into the jaws of death merely to bring me
food; the man that gave up all the world for me--his duty, his love,
his life; the man that has no other purpose now but to save me, and
who, when his whole frame is quivering with anguish, can smile, and
sing, and--"

"Well, what of it?" interrupted Brooke, harshly. "What of it, oh,
thou searcher of hearts? And, moreover, as to nonsense, don't you
know what the poet says?

"'A little nonsense now and then
Is relished by the wisest men.'

Moreover, and, yea, more, as to smiles and laughter, don't you know
what another poet says?--Shakspeare, for instance:

"''Tis better to laugh than be sighing;'

or, as Lord Bacon, or Plato, or somebody else says, 'Lau