the unwisdom of over-population, for whereas the over-production of mites in a cheese do rot the cheese, so doth the over-production of human units rot the world. Therefore it is apparent to the sage and profound that while the material and animal portion of the race may very suitably propagate their kind, they having no higher conception of their bodies or their souls, the more intelligent and cleanly minority of purer and finer temperament may possibly find the way to a nobler and more lasting ‘love’ than that which is wrongfully called by such a name,--a love which shall satisfy without satiating, and which shall bind two spirits so harmoniously in one, that from their union shall be born an immortal offspring of such great thoughts and deeds as shall benefit generations unborn and lead the way back to the lost Paradise!” Here Diana let the book fall in her lap, and sat meditating, gazing into the hollows of the wood fire. Love! It was the thing she had longed for,--the one joy she had missed! To be loved,--to be “dear to someone else” seemed to her the very acme of all desirable attainment. For with Tennyson’s hero in “Maud” she felt: “If I be dear to some one else I should be to myself more dear.” Her thoughts went “homing” like doves down the air spaces of memory to the days when she had, or was fooled into believing she had, a lover whose love would last,--a bold, splendid creature, with broad shoulders and comely countenance, and “eyes which looked love to eyes that spake again,”--and when, as the betrothed bride of the Splendid Creature, she had thanked God night and morning for giving her so much happiness!--when the light in the skies and the flowers in the fields apparently took part in the joyous gratitude of her spirit, and when the very songs of the birds had seemed for her a special wedding chorus! She went over the incidents of that far-away period of her existence,--and presently she began to ask herself what, after all, did they amount to? Why, when they were all cruelly ended, had she shed such wild tears and prayed to God in such desperate agony? Was it worth while to have so shaken her physical and spiritual health for any Splendid Creature? For what had he done to merit such passionate regret?--such weeping and wailing? He had kissed her a great deal (when he was in the mood for kissing), and sometimes more than she quite cared for. He had embraced her in gusts of brief and eager passion, tinged with a certain sensuality which roused in her reluctant repulsion--he had called her by various terms of endearment such as “sweetest,” “dearest,” and “wood-nymph,” a name he had bestowed upon her on one occasion when he had met her by chance in a shady corner of Kew Gardens, and which he thought poetical, but which she privately considered silly,--but what real meaning could be attached to these expressions? When, all suddenly, his regiment was ordered to