"The second bell rang! Ah, why can't we do as our hearts bid us? We have one short life, and it is spoiled by chains of our own forging in deference to narrow custom. I shivered. There was after all an autumn chill in the air. I hate the sound of a steamer bell now.... The third bell! We turn, and I tighten my small fingers in his great hand, and I say good-by and God bless you! Not from a purely religious conception of God, unless it be that God (and I think it does) means all that is good and beautiful, tender and best. I might have said, 'The best I can think of befall you!' A second later, and the streamer rail separates us! I look into his soul through his eyes, and see it is sorry, regretful,--as sorry as I am glad it is so: he is sorry I am going from him, and in that short concentrated gaze his soul comes to me as I would have it come to me. "'When spring comes' I whisper as I lean over to him, while the steamer glides out. He follows it to the end of the pier, and stands there as long as we are in sight. If he had held out his arms and said, 'Woman, stay with me!' I would, I fear, have jumped down and stayed. Didn't know anything about him? No, that is true, only that I had been waiting for something ever since I was old enough to have a want, and that he was that something; that I was nearly thirty when I found him, and--life is short! "I was so glad, in spite of leaving him, that I believe I thought the sun shone differently. I almost asked some people on deck if they did not think that the day was quite the loveliest day ever dawned since the world was a world; if there was not something peculiarly and singularly delicious in the very air? I found a quiet sofa, and lay with closed eyes, and lived it over again.