[Illustration:  I felt myself pulled by two pairs of hands.]

“I don’t care if you’re rich or poor,” he said.  “I don’t know if you’re beautiful—­I only know you’re you.  It’s all I want.”

She shook a little at his vehemence, but she was a long fighter.  “You don’t know me very much,” she went on, her soft voice breaking.  “Maybe it’s only a fancy—­the moonlight and the sailing and all—­maybe you only imagine you like me.”

“Imagine I like you!”

And then, at the sight of his quick movement and of Sally’s face I managed to get behind a curtain and put my fingers in my ears.  No woman has a right to more than one woman’s love-making.  And as I stood there, a few minutes later, I felt myself pulled by two pairs of hands, and Sally and her lover were laughing at me.

“May I have her?  I want her very much,” he said, and I wondered if ever any one could say no to anything he asked.  So, with a word about Sally’s far-away mother and father, I told him, as an old woman might, that I had loved him from the first, and then I said a little of what Sally was to me.

“I like her very much,” I said, in a shaky voice that tried to be casual.  “Are you sure that you like her enough?” For all of his answer, he turned, not even touching her hands, and looked at her.

It was as if I caught again the fragrance of the box hedges in the southern sunshine of a garden where I had walked on a spring morning long ago.  Love is as old-fashioned as the ocean, and us little changed in all the centuries.  Its always yielding, never retreating arms lie about the lands that are built and carved and covered with men’s progress; it keeps the air sweet and fresh above them, and from generation to generation its look and its depths are the same.  That it is stronger than death does not say it all.  I know that it is stronger than life.  Death, with its crystal touch, may make a weak love strong; life, with its every-day wear and tear, must make any but a strong love weak.

I like to think that the look I saw in Richard Leigh’s eyes as he turned toward my girl was the same look I shall see, not so very many years from now, when I close mine on this dear old world, and open them, by the shore of the ocean of eternity, on the face of Geoffrey Meade.

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ADVERTISEMENTS

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BOB AND THE GUIDES

By

MARY RAYMOND SHIPMAN ANDREWS

Illustrated by F.C.  YOHN

12mo. $1.50

“The sketches are breezy, with a freshness nothing short of alluring.  They would make a sportsman of a monk.  The characters of Walter, Bob, the Bishop, the Judge and his Guide are drawn in a fashion that attracts both sympathy and emulation, while the rollicking but delicate humor has rarely been excelled in fiction.”—­Louisville Courier-Journal.