“And you never have, Harry,” she murmured, softly. “You’ve always remembered--always been gentle and kind and loving--all these long years of happiness together.” His eyes felt sympathetically uncomfortable as he looked into hers, moist in the firelight. “Twenty-seven years, dear,” he said, caressingly, consciously defiant of the jealous self that watched. He had taken the plunge. “Twenty-seven years last week since we married.” She nodded her head in acquiescence. “We’ve had our life-time, Harry dear--and we have not wasted it, have we? Every year has been full, full to the brim, with sympathy and love.” She sighed, gazing into the fire. “And that’s the only thing in life that matters--the only thing. Success without love would have been very barren to you, wouldn’t it, Harry?” Her eyes came round to him. “Dead Sea fruit, my darling,” the illusion was almost perfect to him, the irony without bitterness, scarcely perceived, “dust and ashes at the core.” He smiled at her from a strangely sentimental self that was almost foreign to him and yet his own. “Christine, without you I should not really have lived.” She answered him with a movement of the fingers now warm between the hands still holding them. “Nor I, Harry, without you. You and I were each other’s Destiny.” He, too, nodded his head solemnly. “Yes, dear,” he agreed. “I believe that.” “And, thank God, we have not thwarted it, Harry. We have enjoyed it to the full.” He pressed her hand tightly for his only answer. Dream or reality, was it? He had almost lost the power to distinguish. He looked into her face, softly happy and somehow nobler and purer than he had ever known it, pressed her hand again in a vague necessity to substantiate the tangible actuality of her presence. It was really Christine sitting there, filling that usually empty chair, breathing with slight rise and fall of her bosom as she gazed into the fire. And if the other were a dream--the happy past that she called up in imagination--just an old man’s dream, why he would allow himself, that sentimental self in him that none but himself had ever seen, the happiness of the illusion to the full. There was none to ridicule him for a childish make-believe, unworthy of his dignity. “Christine,” he said, gently, “are you happy?” She smiled at him upon her sigh. “Very happy, dear.” Again there was a silence between them. Presently she looked up once more. “It’s splendid the way Phil is getting on, isn’t it, dear?” He glanced at her from his own dream, uncomprehending. She went on, as though discussing a subject thoroughly familiar.