"The hours I spent with thee, Dear Heart, Are as a string of pearls to me; I count them over, every one apart-- My rosary! My rosary!" Iris sang because she was happy, but, none the less, the deep, vibrant voice had an undertone of sadness--a world-old sorrow which, by right of inheritance, was hers. Margaret's thoughts went back to her own girlhood, when she was no older than the unseen singer. Love's cup had been at her lips, then, and had been dashed away by a relentless hand. "O memories that bless and burn! O barren pain and bitter loss! I kiss each bead and strive at last to learn To kiss the cross--Sweetheart! To kiss the cross!" "'To kiss the cross,'" muttered Margaret, then the tears came in a blinding flood. "Mother! Mother!" she sobbed. "How could you!" Insensibly, something was changed, and, for the first time, the woman who had gone to her grave unforgiven, seemed not entirely beyond the reach of pardon. IX Rosemary and Mignonette "Sweet Lady of my Dreams, it cannot be that you are displeased. If you were, I should know, but do not ask me how! "Day by day, my eyes long for the sight of you; night by night my heart remembers you, for that inner vision does not vanish with the sun. You have unconsciously given me a priceless gift, for wherever I may go, I take you with me--all the grace of you, all the beauty, and all the softness. I have only to close my eyes and then I see. "But do not think I keep your image always before me, for it is not so. In the work-a-day world, you have no place. You belong, rather, to those fair lands of fancy which lie just beyond the borders of this world and are, or so I think, very near the gleaming gates of Heaven. "I am not always at work, but sometimes, even when I am, you come tripping before my eyes, so dainty, so wholly exquisite, that I forget what I am doing, and then I must put you aside. But when the day is done, and the light of it shows only through the pinholes pricked in the curtain of night, then I can think of you, as radiant, as beautiful, and as far above me as those very stars. "All unknowingly, you are the light of my day. Whatever darkness might surround me, your eyes would make it noon. However steep and thorny my path, your hand in mine would make it a sunny meadow, swept by shadowy wings, where the white and crimson clover bloomed all day. "You give me life. You make the birds sing more sweetly for me; you make the roses more fragrant, the moonlight more like pearl. You have glorified the commonplace affairs of the day with your enchantment; you have put the joy of the gods into the heart of a man. "Do you wonder that, loving you like this, I do not make myself known? Sweetheart, it is because I fear. Already I have more than I deserve because you are not displeased with me, and since I wrote last I have made progress. Would it surprise you very much if I told you I knew where you lived?