s
everlasting 'Tom, Tom, Tom,' out there in the living room?"

Mrs. Nesbit rocked in her chair and shook an ominous head. Finally she
said: "I wish he'd Tom himself home and stay there, Doctor." The wife
spoke as an oracle with emphasis and authority. "You must speak to the
child!"

The little man puckered his loose-skinned face into a sad, absurdly
pitiful smile and shrilled back:

"Yes--I did speak to her. And she--" he paused.

"Well?" demanded the mother.

"She just fed me back all the decent things I have said of Tom when he
has done my errands." He drummed his fingers helplessly on his chair and
sighed mournfully: "I wonder why I said those things! I really wonder!"

But the voices of the young people rose gayly and disturbed his musings.

It is easy now after a quarter of a century has unfolded its events for
us to lay blame and grow wise in retrospect. It is easy to say that what
happened was foredoomed to happen; and yet here was a man, walking up
and down the curved verandahs that Mrs. Nesbit had added to the house at
odd times, walking up and down, and speaking to a girl in the moonlight,
with much power and fire, of life and his dreams and his aspirations.

Over and over he had sung his mating song. Formerly he had made love as
he tried lawsuits, exhibiting only such fervor as the case required.
There can be no doubt, however, that when he made love to Laura Nesbit,
it was with all the powers of his heart and mind. If he could plead with
a jury for hire, if he could argue with the court and wrangle with
council, how could he meet reason, combat objections, and present the
case of his soul and make up the brief for his own destiny?

He did not try to shield himself when he wooed Laura Nesbit, but she saw
all that he could be. A woman has her vanity of sex, her elaborate,
prematernal pride in her powers, and when man appeals to a woman's
powers for saving him, when he submits the proofs that he is worth
saving, and when he is handsome, with an education in the lore of the
heart that gives him charm and breaks down reserves and barriers--but
these are bygones now--bygones these twenty-five years and more. What
was to be had to be, and what might have been never was, and what their
hopes and high aims were, whose hearts glowed in the fires of life in
Harvey so long ago--and what all our vain, unfruited hopes are worth,
only a just God who reads us truly may say. And a just God would give to
the time an