No, no, dear wife, deny me not these fair old dreams of youth, You well may smile, for life has taught the patience and the truth. Time tried, long tested, up the hill we’ve journeyed side by side, Or drifted in the ebb and flow of fortune’s fateful tide. The years may come, the years may go, yet love will find the test. Youth’s dreams are good, yet that which lives on life’s hard road is best, And so you grant me my romance—perhaps I do not know, You, too, are thinking of the days when you were Henry’s beau. And so I sit beside the fire when night pulls down the blind, And wander back to youth once more with all my cares behind. The winds of trouble rage outside, we care not how they blow, Back in those golden days of youth—when I was Mary’s beau.” * * * * * TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES. 1. Silently corrected simple spelling, grammar, and typographical errors. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Adventures in Silence, by Herbert Winslow Collingwood