Oh yes, she understood now! A burning blush, a gasping sigh at the shock of flooding memory! She still struggled to forget this blighting thing. But could she ever again listen to such words without pain or shame? She had the courage of a proud race. If her lips trembled, she could at least lift her eyes to meet that immemorial look of brooding tenderness, and she could ask timidly if he would hear her recite the conjugation of the regular verb to see if she had forgotten. Why is it that these sober old grammars, full of hard-and-fast rules--and bewildering exceptions--strewing the path of learning with needless thorns and obstructions of every sort, still instinctively chose the one verb ardent youth conjugates with no teaching at all? First person, singular number, present tense, declarative mood--_I love_, transitive, requiring an object to complete its meaning, as life itself requires one--_you_. No pause! The story neither begins there, nor ends. How tireless that confession; how thrilling that mutual self-analysis; what glamour over every aspect! Past, to the beginning of things, future to Eternity; the insistent, pleading interrogative, _do you love_; the absurd potential, as if there ever was any may or might about it; the inevitable, continuing state, _loving_; the infinitive _to love_--all the meaning and purpose of life; and the crown of immortality _to have loved_. Then that strange, introspective subjunctive, wild with vain regret, that youth ponders with disbelief that Fate could ever so defraud--that a few lonely souls have had to con in the sad evening of empty lives: _If we had loved!_ O, sweet Ann Rutledge, could you endure to look back across such arid years and think of this lover denied? No! No matter what life yet held for them of joy or sorrow, the conjugation is to be finished with the first person plural, future-perfect, declarative. At the very worst--and best--and last, robbing even death of its sting, at least: _We shall have loved._ And so they sat there long, in the peaceful evening light, looking out across the river with the singing name, that purls and ripples over its gravelly bars and sings the story of their love, forever!