"I think it is, my darling--light of my eyes and core of my heart," he responded low and feelingly. "You are to me the dearest, sweetest, loveliest of earthly creatures. I can never cease wondering at my great good fortune in securing such a treasure for my own. I am rich, rich in love. My children are all very near and dear to me, and I know and feel that I am to them, but you--ah, I think you are dearer than all five of them put together!" "Ah," she said with a joyous smile, "those are sweet, sweet words to me! And yet they make me feel almost as if I had robbed them--your children. They all love you so dearly, as you have said, and set so high a value upon your love to them." "And it is very great: none the less because my love for you is still greater. You, my dear wife, are my second self--'bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.' It is right that our mutual love should exceed all other earthly loves." "Yes; and yet I fear it would make Lu--perhaps Gracie also--unhappy to know that you have greater love for anyone else than for them." "I think they do know it, and also that it is right that it should be so. And I presume they will both some day love someone else better than their father. I cannot blame them if they do." "Perhaps the love differs more in kind than degree," Violet said presently. "Yes; there is something in that," he returned; "yet it is not altogether that which satisfies me. We are all bidden to love one another. 'Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the Church, and gave himself for it.... So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself.... Let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself.'" He paused and Violet finished the quotation. "'And the wife see that she reverence her husband.' Ah, it is easy for me to do that with such a husband as mine," she added. "Also, I remember that in Paul's epistle to Titus there is a passage, where the aged women are bidden to teach the younger ones to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children. And in the next verse to be obedient to their husbands. I think I have kept that command as far as I could without getting any orders from mine," she concluded, smiling up into his eyes.