They left her alone with Peter in the drawing room in the interval before the coffee, seeing that he had barely spoken to her though his eyes had not left her face since the moment of her spectacular appearance between the portiÈres.

“I’m not going to marry you, Peter,” Beulah whispered, as she slipped by him to the door, “don’t think of me. Think of her.”

But Peter was almost past coherent thought or speech as they stood facing each other on the hearth-rug,—Eleanor’s little head up and her breath coming lightly between her sweet, parted lips.

“Where did you go?” Peter groaned. “How could you, dear—how could you,—how could you?”

“I’m back all safe, now, Uncle Peter. I took up nursing in a hospital.”

“I didn’t even find you. I swore that I would. I’ve searched for you everywhere.” 305

“I’m sorry I made you all that trouble,” Eleanor said, “but I thought it would be the best thing to do.”

“Tell me why,” Peter said, “tell me why, I’ve suffered so much—wondering—wondering.”

“You’ve suffered?” Eleanor cried. “I thought it was only I who did the suffering.”

She moved a step nearer to him, and Peter gripped her hard by the shoulders.

“It wasn’t that you cared?” he said. Then his lips met hers dumbly, beseechingly.

“It was all a mistake,—my going away,” she wrote some days after. “I ought to have stayed at the school, and graduated, and then come down to New York, and faced things. I have my lesson now about facing things. If any other crisis comes into my life, I hope I shall be as strong as Dante was, when he ‘showed himself more furnished with breath than he was,’ and said, ‘Go on, for I am strong and resolute.’ I think we always have more strength than we understand ourselves to have.

“I am so wonderfully happy about Uncle David and Aunt Margaret, and I know Uncle Jimmie 306 needs Aunt Gertrude and has always needed her. Did my going away help those things to their fruition? I hope so.

“I can not bear to think of Aunt Beulah, but I know that I must bear to think of her, and face the pain of having hurt her as I must face every other thing that comes into my life from this hour. I would give her back Peter, if I could,—but I can not. He is mine, and I am his, and we have been that way from the beginning. I have thought of him always as stronger and wiser than any one in the world, but I don’t think he is. He has suffered and stumbled along, trying blindly to do right, hurting Aunt Beulah and mixing up his life like any man, just the way Uncle Jimmie and Uncle David did.

“Don’t men know who it is they love? They seem so often to be struggling hungrily after the wrong thing, trying to get, or to make themselves take, some woman that they do not really want. When women love it is not like that with them.

“When women love! I think I have loved Peter from the first minute I saw him, so beautiful and dear and sweet, with that anxious look in his eyes,—that look of consideration for the other 307 person that is always so much a part of him. He had it the first night I saw him, when Uncle David brought me to show me to my foster parents for the first time. It was the thing I grew up by, and measured men and their attitude to women by—just that look in his eyes, that tender warm look of consideration.

“It means a good many things, I think,—a gentle generous nature, and a tender chivalrous heart. It means selflessness. It means being a good man, and one who protects by sheer unselfish instinct. I don’t know how I shall ever heal him of the hurt he has done Aunt Beulah. Aunt Margaret tells me that Aunt Beulah’s experience with him has been the thing that has made her whole, that she needed to live through the human cycle of emotion—of love and possession and renunciation before she could be quite real and sound. This may be true, but it is not the kind of reasoning for Peter and me to comfort ourselves with. If a surgeon makes a mistake in cutting that afterwards does more good than harm, he must not let that result absolve him from his mistake. Nothing can efface the mistake itself, and Peter and I must go on feeling that way about it. 308

“I want to write something down about my love before I close this book to-night. Something that I can turn to some day and read, or show to my children when love comes to them. ‘This is the way I felt,’ I want to say to them, ‘the first week of my love—this is what it meant to me.’

“It means being a greater, graver, and more beautiful person than you ever thought you could be. It means knowing what you are, and what you were meant to be all at once, and I think it means your chance to be purified for the life you are to live, and the things you are to do in it. Experience teaches, but I think love forecasts and points the way, and shows you what you can be. Even if the light it sheds should grow dim after a while, the path it has shown you should be clear to your inner eye forever and ever. Having been in a great temple is a thing to be better for all your life.

“It means that the soul and the things of the soul are everlasting,—that they have got to be everlasting if love is like this. Love between two people is more than the simple fact of their being drawn together and standing hand in hand. It is 309 the holy truth about the universe. It is the rainbow of God’s promise set over the land. There comes with it the soul’s certainty of living on and on through time and space.

“Just my loving Peter and Peter’s loving me isn’t the important thing,—the important thing is the way it has started the truth going; my knowing and understanding mysterious laws that were sealed to me before; Peter taking my life in his hands and making it consecrated and true,—so true that I will not falter or suffer from any misunderstandings or mistaken pain.

“It means warmth and light and tenderness, our love does, and all the poetry in the world, and all the motherliness, (I feel so much like his mother). Peter is my lover. When I say that he is not stronger or wiser than any one in the world I mean—in living. I mean in the way he behaves like a little bewildered boy sometimes. In loving he is stronger and wiser than any living being. He takes my two hands in his and gives me all the strength and all the wisdom and virtue there is in the world.

“I haven’t written down anything, after all, that 310 any one could read. My children can’t look over my shoulder on to this page, for they would not understand it. It means nothing to any one in the world but me. I shall have to translate for them or I shall have to say to them, ‘Children, on looking into this book, I find I can’t tell you what love meant to me, because the words I have put down would mean nothing to you. They were only meant to inform me, whenever I should turn back to them, of the great glory and holiness that fell upon me like a garment when love came.’

“And if there should be any doubt in my heart as to the reality of the feeling that has come to them in their turn, I should only have to turn their faces up to the light, and look into their eyes and know.

“I shall not die as my own mother did. I know that. I know that Peter will be by my side until we both are old. These facts are established in my consciousness I hardly know how, and I know that they are there,—but if such a thing could be that I should die and leave my little children, I would not be afraid to leave them alone in a world that has been so good to me, under the 311 protection of a Power that provided me with the best and kindest guardians that a little orphan ever had. God bless and keep them all, and make them happy.”

THE END