"But I never got through wonderin' over the way Milly bore with Sam in the days when he was walkin' the downward path and it looked like nothin' could stop him. Human nature is a curious thing, child. You may think you know a person so well that you can tell exactly what he'll do, if a certain thing happens; but many and many time I've found myself mistaken about folks I'd known all my life, and it was that way with Milly. Milly was high-tempered and quick-spoken, and if anybody had asked me how Milly would act if Sam took to drinkin', I'd 'a' said at once, 'Why, she'd leave him that quick.' But she didn't; she was as patient with him as any mother ever was with her son. She'd put him to bed and wait on him, and when he'd come to himself she'd never say a word about what had happened, and I reckon it was her grace that saved him. "And, it's another curious thing, child," she continued, "how two people'll live together for years and years and never know how much they love each other. Milly told me that when Sam burst out cryin' and said he didn't know she cared that much for him, it come over her all at once that she must 'a' been a mighty poor sort o' wife to him, for him not to know she loved him well enough to stay with him through thick and thin. But I reckon it's that way with most married folks. They jog along together, and they have their ups and downs, and may be they think many a time they don't love each other like they did when they first married, but jest let a trouble come up, and they'll find out that all the love they used to have is there yet, and more besides. "I ricollect Parson Page sayin' once that love and money was alike in one respect, they'd both draw interest, and I reckon many a married couple's richer than they think they are." To find our treasure of love greater than we had dared to dream--what rarer joy has earth? And when the poor derelict soul clung to his wife and found in her a help sufficient for his needs, his was a rapture not less profound than that of the poet-husband when he opened the sonnets in which a woman's soul had poured itself, counting the ways and measuring the depth and the height of her wifely love. Aunt Jane pushed her spectacles up on her forehead, folded her hands, and leaned back in her chair, lost in the reverie that generally followed the telling of a story, while I gazed at the tremulous fire light, and felt the cord of human sympathy drawing me closer to the people of her day and time.