gger and stableman calls to her, and the
yard is always full of their towheaded children. I'll give her up."

And the Doctor gurgled a chuckle and gave her up also.

She always came with her father to the Adamses on Sunday afternoons, and
while the Doctor and Amos Adams on the porch went into the matter of the
universe as either a phantasm superinduced by the notion of time, or the
notion of time as an hallucination of those who believed in space, down
by the creek Grant and Laura sitting under the oak near the silent,
green pool were feeling their way around the universe, touching shyly
and with great abasement the cords that lead from the body to the soul,
from material to the spiritual, from dust to God.

It is a queer world, a world that is past finding out. Here are two
children, touching souls in the fleetest, lightest way in the world, and
the touch welds them together forever. And along come two others, and
even as the old song has it, "after touch of wedded hands," they are
strangers yet. No one knows what makes happiness in love. Certainly
marriage is no part of it. Certainly it is not first love, for first
lovers often quarrel like cats. Certainly it is not separation, for
absence, alas, does not make the heart grow fonder; nor is it
children--though the good God knows that should help; for they are love
incarnate. Certainly it is not respect, for respect is a stale, cold
comforter, and love is deeper than respect, and often lives without
it--let us whisper the truth in shame. What, then, is this irrational
current of the stuff of life, that carries us all in its sway, that
brings us to earth, that guides our destiny here--makes so vastly for
our happiness or woe, gives us strength or makes us weak, teaches us
wisdom or leads us into folly unspeakable, and all unseen, unmeasured
and infinitely mysterious?

There was young Tom Van Dorn. Love was a pleasurable emotion, and
because it put a joyous fever in his blood, it enhanced his life. But he
never defined love; he merely lived on it. Then there was Ahab Wright
who regarded love as a kind of sin and when he married the pale,
bloodless, shadowy bookkeeper in Wright & Perry's store, he regarded the
charivari prepared by Morty Sands and George Brotherton as a shameful
rite and tried for an hour to lecture the crowd in his front yard on the
evils of unseemly conduct before he gave them an order on the store for
a bucket of mixed candy. If Ahab had defined love