f tenderness. "Nobody is like you. Nobody ever was. Surely
God will not part us. Surely He will not. He is too good."

"No, dear, He will not. Some day I shall come back. It will not be
long. Perhaps I shall find you waiting for me in this same little
summer-house. Let us think of that. It was here, you know, we found out
each other's secret that day."

"I had found out yours long before," she said, faintly smiling.

"Time 's up, Phil." It was Mr. Morton's voice calling to them from the
piazza.

"I must go, darling. Good-by."

"Oh, no, not yet; not quite yet," she wailed, clinging to him. "Why, we
have been here but a few moments. It can't be ten minutes yet."

Under the influence of that close, passionate embrace, those clinging
kisses and mingling tears, there began to come over Philip a feeling of
weakness, of fainting courage, a disposition to cry out, "Nothing can be
so terrible as this. I will not bear it; I will not go." By a tyrannical
effort of will, against which his whole nature cried out, he unwound her
arms from his neck and said in a choked voice:--

"Darling, this is harder than any battle I shall have to fight, but this
is what I enlisted for. I must go."

He had reached the door of the summer-house, not daring for honor's sake
to look back, when a heartbroken cry smote his ear.

"You have n't kissed me good-by!"

He had kissed her a hundred times, but these kisses she apparently
distinguished from the good-by kiss. He came back, and taking her again
in his embrace, kissed her lips, her throat, her bosom, and then once
more their lips met, and in that kiss of parting which plucks the heart
up by the roots.

How strong must be the barrier between one soul and another that they do
not utterly merge in moments like that, turning the agony of parting to
the bliss of blended being!

Pursued by the sound of her desolate sobbing, he fled away.

The stable-boy held the dancing horse at the gate, and Mr. Morton and
his sister stood waiting there.

"Good-by, Phil, till we see you again," said Miss Morton, kissing him
tenderly. "We 'll take good care of her for you."

"Will you please go to her now?" he said huskily. "She is in the
summer-house. For God's sake try to comfort her."

"Yes, poor boy, I will," she answered. He shook hands with Mr. Morton
and jumped into the buggy.

"I 'll get a furlough and be back in a few months, maybe. Be sure to
tell her that," he said.

The stable-boy stood