He turned to the musing woman beside him and mechanically reached out his hand. Hers lay on the arm of her chair. The next instant he would have dropped his upon it and held it there. But as he made the motion her eyes looked up into his, so passion-free and holy that his own arm fell by his side. But the little wave of passion in him only stirred him to his depths. Ere she knew it or could stop him he was telling her the story of his love for her. Poetry,--romance,--and with it the strength of saying,--fell from his lips as naturally as snow from the clouds. He went into the history of old loves--how, of all loves they are the greatest--of Jacob who served his fourteen years for Rachel, of the love of Petrarch, of Dante. "Do you know Browning's most beautiful poem?" he asked at last. His voice was tenderly mellow: "All that I know of a certain star Is, it can throw (like the angled spar) Now a dart of red, now a dart of blue; Till my friends have said they would fain see, too, My star that dartles the red and the blue! Then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs furled: They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it. What matter to me if their star is a world? Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it." "Alice," he said, drawing his chair closer to her, "I know I have no such life to offer as you would bring to me. The best we men can do is to do the best we can. We are saved only because there is one woman we can look to always as our star. There is much of our past that we all might wish to change, but change, like work, is the law of life, and we must not always dream." Quietly he had dropped his hand upon hers. Her own eyes were far off--they were dreaming. So deep was her dream that she had not noticed it. Passion practised, as he was, the torch of her hand thrilled him as with wine; and as with wine was he daring. "I know where your thoughts have been," he went on. She looked up with a start and her hand slipped from under his into her lap. It was a simple movement and involuntary--like that of the little brown quail when she slips from the sedge-grass into the tangled depths of the blossoming wild blackberry bushes at the far off flash of a sharp-shinned hawk-wing, up in the blue. Nor could she say whether she saw it, or whether it was merely a shadow, an instinctive signal from the innocent courts of the sky to the brood-children of her innocence below. But he saw it and said quickly, changing with it the subject: "At least were--but all that has passed. I need you, Alice," he went on passionately--"in my life, in my work. My home is there, waiting! It has been waiting all these years for you--its mistress--the only mistress it shall ever have. Your mother"--Alice looked at him surprised.