“How much misery I have brought to you!” she said. “Misery!” “Shame and hunger.” “Joan!” He turned in his chair, drew her into his arms so that her head rested on his shoulder as she kneeled beside him. Her hair threaded his black coat with gold. “Joan, wife, never speak so to me.” “It is the truth.” “A splendid truth to me. Would I return to my vile servitude and lose the glory of you out of my heart?” She sighed deeply, the sigh of a woman well beloved, and looked up at him from amid her hair. “I am utterly happy,” she said, “for we are together.” “And that is heaven.” “For me.” She laid her fingers upon his closed lids and kissed his lips. “You must rest to-night,” she said, “for you are weary, and a tired brain thinks but feebly. Come, I will gather your papers and put out the lamp. I am your wife, and I must care for you.” XXXVI POVERTY, when the bride of need, is in truth a skeleton in ragged raiment. Those folk who prate of the beauties of indigence and of the divine unselfishness of so saintly a state should test the superstition with some leaning towards truth. God help those who are born both proud and poor. God help those who have fallen from the car of opulence into the slough of hunger and of need. Joan and Gabriel had discovered the many curses of that cultured poverty which is the most piteous product of a diseased civilization. They found the old quip true, that greed, not God, rules the hearts of the many. Penury had encompassed them. Children of an ungenerous shame, they braved the hundred ignominies that poverty creates. Economy was with them, as with thousands of their fellows, a juggling with coins, a plotting with pence, a combat with trifles. Their very existence was a contorted and twisted struggle to escape the coils of annihilation. They had become as drift-wood on the billows of the great city. Alone in the vast solitudes of that human sea, they struggled for life, unknown, abandoned to their own fate, acknowledged of none. It was such a trial as sours the soul and fills the heart with malice towards those careless of the miseries of their fellows. Like twin shoots cut from a green and luxuriant tree, they had been thrust into sand and left to suck sustenance from brine. They were together, and their love sustained them. It strengthened the man’s heart like wine, touched him with a lustre of heroism, chastened his whole soul. Gabriel began to comprehend in those troublous days the strange, rich beauty of a woman’s love. Joan’s tenderness, her transcendent courage, kept him mellowed against the gall of care. She was as sunshine and the perfume of roses amid rotting ruins, a shaft of joy gleaming amid gloom. Self seemed never with her. There was never a frown upon her face, an unworthy word upon her lips. She moved through the sordid realism of life unconsciously divine, spontaneously beautiful.