"I'll be something, or try to be, if you want it. I'm a tired soldier now, Nellie, on sick leave. I told the adjutant I was in love, too, but he wouldn't put it in the permit. Let's go home." They went up past the militant church, and Thaddeus and Rachel waited, smiling, at the gate under the lilacs. Simon's epitaph and the fading mountain were left facing each other across the dusk. In any issue between them, the dignity of law and time seemed to be with the mountain as against the personal claim, yet one did not come to Hagar to learn among its twilights that humanity was degenerate nature, or that the instinct of its insistent identity was lawless; it might be an amendment in the process of making. "They're coming," said Thaddeus. "The older I grow, Mrs. Mavering, the more I perceive a certain dexterity in the--in fact, in event; a shell now, for instance, skilfully exploded." Rachel only smiled and threw open the gate. I heard a pilgrim near a temple gate Crying, "I have no fear if thou art Fate; Morn, eve, and noon, if I look up to thee, Wilt thou at night look down, remembering me? Nay, then, my sins so great, my service small"-- So prayed he at the gate--"forget them all; Of claims and rights a load the while I keep, How in thy nights, O God, to smile and sleep?" "Pilgrim," I said, "hath He, who toils the while, Bade thee, of burdens free, now sleep and smile? Who built the hills on high and laid the sea, Set in thy heart that cry, 'Remember me.'" From _Persian Moralities_. THE END _American Contemporary Novels_ LET NOT MAN PUT ASUNDER BY BASIL KING _This is the tenth of the twelve One-a-Month American Novels to be published during 1901._ "The new volume in the American Novel Series, which will, we doubt not, more than justify that undertaking in the eyes of American readers. Mr. King has a firm grasp of character; ... he handles dialogue with epigrammatic felicity, and he has something to say.... Mr. King's study of his heroine is an admirable performance.... A novel worthy of the notice of all thinking and observing Americans. Its qualities as a story are deepened by its meaning as a study of temperament and changing social conditions."--Richard Henry Stoddard in _New York Mail and Express_. "'Let Not Man Put Asunder' is clever, spicy, absorbing, and thought-inspiring--a book with many missions.... A novel in which the problems of unhappy marriage and separation are very seriously and comprehensively considered."--_New York World_. "The story moves through unusually brilliant dialogue and a series of exciting scenes to its swift and inevitable conclusion."--_Public Opinion_, New York. "A book that fairly throbs with intense interest from start to finish.... Its characters are living portraitures. It is thoroughly sane and sound."--_Philadelphia Item_. _Comments from various reviewers_: