bt, and she trembles, and dare not take it yet. And sometimes the
pain is all but the death she foresees; yet even as she submits to it,
it lays upon her heart the finger of hope. And then she trembles again,
because she need not take it yet. Those are her chances, Peter. But
when she knows that her beloved is her lover, life may do what it will
with her; but she is beyond its chances for ever."

"Your corn! you kept my corn!"

"Till it should bear. And your shell there--you've kept my shell."

"Till it should speak. And now--oh, see these things that have held our
dreams for twenty years! The life is threshed from them for ever--they
are only husks. They can hold our dreams no more. Oh, I can't go on
dreaming by myself, I can't, it's no use. I thought my heart had
learned to bear its dream alone, but the time comes when love in its
beauty is too near to pain. There is more love than the single heart
can bear. Good-by, my boy--good-by!"

"Helen! don't suffer so! oh, child, what are you doing?--"

"Letting my dear dreams go...it's no use, Peter..."

The millstones took them and crushed them.

She uttered a sharp cry....

His arm tightened round her. "What is it, child?" she heard him say.

She looked at him bewildered, and saw that he too was dazed. She looked
into the gray-green eyes of a boy of twenty. She said in a voice of
wonder, "Oh, my boy!" as he felt her soft hair.

"Such a fuss about an empty shell and a bit of dead wheat."

She hid her face on his jersey.

"You are a silly, aren't you?" said Peter. "I wish you'd look up."

Helen looked up, and they kissed each other for the first time.

I defy you now, Mistress Jennifer, to prove that your grassblade is
greener than mine.

THIRD INTERLUDE

The girls now turned their attention to their neglected apples, varying
this more serious business with comments on the story that had just
been related.

Jessica: I should be glad to know, Jane, what you make of this matter.

Jane: Indeed, Jessica, it is difficult to make anything at all of
matter so bewildering. For who could have divined reality to be the
illusion and dreams the truth? so that by the light of their dreams the
lovers in this tale mistook each other for that which they were not.

Martin: Who indeed, Mistress Jane, save students of human nature like
yourselves?--who have doubtless long ago observed how men and women
begin by filling a dim dream with a golden thing, such as youth,