It does not come from without. The train missed, the passage paid for and not connected, the column that marches away, one set broken, the sentry post to which a strange figure is called--these are but matters to laugh at afterward. The shadow comes between them from their own failure. It is slow to lift. In the final elevation of romance, there shows one sunken length.... There is the moment of meeting and the moment of parting; that which lies between, whether an hour or generation, forms but the equal third, for the great love intervals of human kind are not measured by time, but by the opening of the doors of the heart. By the very laws of our being, the doors draw together against rapture prolonged. The man who crosses the world to live one day with his sweetheart, sees her at last in the doorway or the trysting-place as he cannot see her again; and in the tear of parting, something different of her, something that has been occulted, clears magically for his eyes. It must not blind him to remain, for it is her gift to abide with him over the divide. It passes, not to come again if he remains; rapture falls into indulgence; the fibre of integrity weakens and lets them down into mere mortals. Man is not ready for the real revelation of romance in whom a master does not arise at the stroke. * * * * * That night there was a _mew_ at the door. They had finished tea and were sitting by the fire. The woman opened the door and a young tabby-puss walked leisurely in, moved in a circle about the room, tail held high. Chair and table and lounge, she brushed against, standing upon her toes, eyes blinking at the fire. The woman brought a saucer of milk. The visitor drank, as if that were all very well, but that she could have done well enough until breakfast. Apparently it was not her way to land upon friends in a starving condition. Before the fire, she now sat, adding a point to her toilet from time to time, inspecting it carefully and long. Finally she turned to the woman, hopped upon her knee and settled to doze. She had accepted them, and they called her _Elsie_. “Little-Else-to-do,” said the woman. They stood beside the child’s bed later that night. It rained, and the home closed in upon them with its cheer and humble beauty. He saw her hand now in everything--even the rungs of the chairs shone in the firelight. The hearth was swept. Her face--it was a place of power, and such a fusion of tenderness was there, the eyes pure and merciful. All that he had known before her coming was unfinished, explanatory. She had shown him what a human adult woman should be in this year of our Lord. His soul yearned to her; his whole life nestling to this place of hers--as her stone cot nestled to the cliff.... She was always very quiet about her love for the child when he was near. That was because he loved the Gleam so well.... Yet he had seen the Firelight Madonna. “You have made it all I can do--to go away,” he said.