I thought my heart broke in the rush Of tears that blotted out the flush Of draping vine and burning bough. ‘Oh, love of mine!’—thus ran my vow— ‘Let Heaven but stoop to hear my prayer, But lift the cross I cannot bear, This lonely, living death of pain, And give my darling back again To longing heart and straining eyes— To grief and loss in other guise, Silent I’ll bow, and, smiling, see Sweet dawn in gloom that’s shared with thee!’” The champagne had been heady, and there was a good deal of hock. Tears of maudlin sentimentality suffused the reader’s eyes at the metrical tribute to himself as his wife’s “hero-saint.” So long as she published nothing of the sort, it was pleasant to find, accidentally, that she wrote love verses in his absence, dedicated to him. He had not suspected how much she felt their parting—she had borne herself so heroically. Brushing away the soft moisture, he read on: “To-day, I stood and saw him stay His horse upon the woodland way, And toss to me a gay farewell. The chestnut leaves about him fell; The royal maples burned and shone, Veiling misshapen branch and stone, The misty clematis lay white; The woodbine from the cedar’s height, The sumach’s crimson cones, the breath That amber hickories yield in death— All were the same. October rare Held sway divine o’er earth and air. The horseman’s port was kingly—yet My lips unwrung, my eyes unwet, My heart recoils in cold despair At memory of that granted prayer. * * * * * My beautiful dead dream! The Spring Beyond Life’s winter, which will bring Earth’s buried ones to love’s embrace, Will hold for me no quickening grace. Summers may go, Octobers come;— Deep out of sight, and pale and dumb, Lies the hope that never was to be. My saint who lived not—save to me!” He went over the second section of the poem twice before the wine-warmed brain accepted the significance of the lines. Then, he swore a little. He would be no-matter-what-ed if he could make out women’s fantasies. He supposed this was a fancy sketch, an impersonal rigmarole, altogether, but it was no-matter-what-ed (again) disagreeable stuff for a fellow to read who recollected that he had ridden away last October from a dry-eyed wife into the burning heart of such a wood as was here described. He did not remember turning under the maple tree, it was true—if indeed there were a maple tree at the top of the hill. There might be some mistake in the whole thing, but it went against a fellow’s grain to admit the possibility that his wife had another man even in the eye of her imagination.