What say the beeches, heart of my heart? (Comrades we three!) Wise in their canopied gallery of art— Clear-visioned, true, in their cloisters apart From the life which dwarfs when the soul is the mart Of passions set free. Write it, dear beeches—historian tree— Write it for me. My heart, it hath doubted; my soul, it hath slept. Alone with the trees and the stars it hath wept, Not knowing the mystery, not seeing the end— Oh, be to it, beeches—calm beeches—its friend! For part of the Infinite—you and the stars— Sing it the Truth with your infinite bars. The little leaves whisper’d, baby-voiced, low; The finger-limbs wrote it ’mid starlighted glow: "_Love and believe, and be kind as you go!_" (O Heart, it is so!) Why should you care for me to write of war and that last bloody fight, now that I am at home again, and my heart in the melting? Is it because it takes it all to make life, the melting, the June days, and the fight? And why have I written all this, here, at The Home Stretch, months after it has happened, with you coming, even as I write it, down the old sweet path to me, in the old sweet way? Coming to see if I have finished my letter to you. And I wrote it because but yesterday you said, "Jack, dear, I want you to finish that letter you wrote me in the Philippines, the one you wrote to _your love that was lost_. Finish it, Jack, this one here at home for me, in our own home, _ours_, and _for your love that was found!_" And so I have done it, sweetheart. *IV* *THE BURGEONING* "Now burgeons every maze of quick About the flowering squares, and thick By ashen roots the violets blow." —Tennyson. *CHAPTER I* *TWO OF A KIND* As I said at the beginning, this is my story, and the telling of it must be in my own way. It does not satisfy me to end it with our home-coming, and I hold that no story is complete unless it satisfies, first of all, him who tells it. Why should love stories end at the altar? For there is that in life which surpasses the altar in sweetness. It is the hearth. And there is that which is greater than love making. It is the home making. And there are those in every marriage that is a marriage, of far greater worth to the world—since only through them may the world’s work go on—than the two who joined their lives at the altar, and they are the children who come of the marriage.