"You know it has become such a dreadful thing to me--the responsibility for pain and death.... It is horrible for humanity to usurp such a power--to dare interfere with life--to mar it, end it!... Children do not understand. I was nothing more a few months ago. To my intelligence the shallow arguments of those takers of life called sportsmen was sufficient. I supposed that because almost all the little children of the wild were doomed to die by violence, sooner or later, that the quicker death I offered was pardonable on the score of mercy." ... She shook her head. "Why death and pain exist, I do not know; He who deals them must know why." He said, surprised at her seriousness: "Right or wrong, a matter of taste cannot be argued--" "A matter of taste! Every fibre of me rebels at the thought of death--of inflicting it on anything. God knows how I could have done it when I had so much of happiness myself!" She swung around toward him: "Sooner or later what remains to say between us must be said, Garry. I think the time is now--here in my garden--in the clear daylight of the young summer.... You have that last letter of my girlhood?" "I burned it." "I have every letter you ever wrote me. They are in my desk upstairs. The desk is not locked." "Had you not better destroy them?" "Why?" "As you wish," he said, looking at the ground. "One keeps the letters of the dead," she said; "your youth and mine"--she made a little gesture downward as though smoothing a grave--daintily. They were very unwise, sitting there in the sunshine side by side, tremendously impressed with the catastrophe of life and with each other--still young enough to be in earnest, to take life and each other with that awesome finality which is the dread privilege of youth. She spoke with conviction of the mockery of life, of wisdom and its sadness; he looked upon the world in all the serious disillusion of youth, and saw it strewn with the fragments of their wrecked happiness. They were very emotional, very unhappy, very, very much in love; but the truly pathetic part of it all lay in her innocent conviction that a marriage witnessed by the world was a sanctuary within the circle of which neither she nor he had any reason to fear each other or themselves. The thing was done; hope slain. They, the mourners, might now meet in safety to talk together over the dead--suffer together among the graves of common memories, sadly tracing, reverently marking with epitaphs appropriate the tombs which held the dead days of their youth. Youth believes; Age is the sceptic. So they did not know that, as nature abhors a vacuum, youth cannot long tolerate the vacuity of grief. Rose vines, cut to the roots, climb the higher. No checking ever killed a passion. Just now her inexperience was driving her into platitudes. "Dear Garry," she said gently, "it is such happiness to talk to you like this; to know that you understand."