We need never have lost sight and touch of each other; we might have grown up, and learned and worked and struggled together from the first--boy and girl, brother and sister, lovers, man and wife--and yet have found our blessed dream-land and dwelt in it just the same. Children might have been born to us! Sweet children, _beaux comme le jour_, as in Madame Perrault's fairy tales; even beautiful and good as their mother. And as we talked of these imaginary little beings and tried to picture them, we felt in ourselves such a stupendous capacity for loving the same that we would fall to weeping on each other's shoulders. Full well I knew, even as if they had formed a part of my own personal experience, all the passion and tenderness, all the wasted anguish of her brief, ill-starred motherhood: the very ache of my jealousy that she should have borne a child to another man was forgotten in that keen and thorough comprehension! Ah, yes ... that hungry love, that woful pity, which not to know is hardly quite to have lived! Childless as I am (though old enough to be a grandfather) I have it all by heart! Never could we hope for son or daughter of our own. For us the blessed flower of love in rich, profuse, unfading bloom; but its blessed fruit of life, never, never, never! Our only children were Mimsey and Gogo, between whom and ourselves was an impassable gulf, and who were unconscious of our very existence, except for Mimsey's strange consciousness that a Fairy Tarapatapoum and a Prince Charming were watching over them. All this would always end, as it could not but end, in our realizing the more fully our utter dependence on each other for all that made life not only worth living, ingrates that we were, but a heaven on earth for us both; and, indeed, we could not but recognize that merely thus to love and be loved was in itself a thing so immense (without all the other blessings we had) that we were fain to tremble at our audacity in daring to wish for more. * * * * * Thus sped three years, and would have sped all the rest, perhaps, but for an incident that made an epoch in our joint lives, and turned all our thoughts and energies in a new direction. Part Six [Illustration] Some petty annoyance to which I had been subjected by one of the prison authorities had kept me awake for a little while after I had gone to bed, so that when at last I awoke in "Magna sed Apta," and lay on my couch there (with that ever-fresh feeling of coming to life in heaven after my daily round of work in an earthly jail), I was conscious that Mary was there already, making coffee, the fragrance of which filled the room, and softly humming a tune as she did so--a quaint, original, but most beautiful tune, that thrilled me with indescribable emotion, for I had never heard it with the bodily ear before, and yet it was as familiar to me as "God save the Queen."