That all this is inevitable makes it none the less sad.  The young Mesuriers were neither fools nor hard of heart; and sometimes, in moments of sympathy, their parents would be revealed to them in sudden lights of pathos and old romance.  They would listen to some old love-affair of their mother’s as though it had been their own, or go out of their way to make their father tell once more the epic of the great business over which he presided, and which, as he conceived it, was doubtless a greater poem than his son would ever write.  Yet still even in such genuine sympathy, there was a certain imaginative effort to be made.  The gulf between the generations, however hidden for the moment, was always there.

Yet, after all, James and Mary Mesurier possessed an incorruptible treasure, which their children had neither given nor could take away.  To regard them as without future would be a shallow observation,—­for love has always a future, however old in mortal years it may have grown; and as they grew older, their love seemed to grow stronger.  Involuntarily they seemed to draw closer together, as by an instinct of self-preservation.  Their love had been before their children; were they to be spared, it would still be the same love, sweeter by trial, when their children had passed from them.  In this love had been wise for them.  Some parents love their children so unwisely that they forget to love each other; and, when the children forsake them, are left disconsolate.  One has heard young mothers say that now their boy has come, their husbands may take a second place; and often of late we have heard the woman say:  “Give me but the child, and the lover can go his ways.”  Foolish, unprophetic women!  Let but twenty years go by, and how glad you will be of that rejected lover; for, though a son may suffice for his mother, what mother has ever sufficed for her son?

But though sometimes, as they looked at their parents, the young Mesuriers caught a glimpse of the infinite sadness of a life-work accomplished, yet it failed to warn them against the eager haste with which they were hurrying on towards a like conclusion.  Too late they would understand that all the joy was in the doing; too soon say to themselves:  “Was it for this that our little world shook with such fiery commotion and molten ardours, that this present should be so firm and insensitive beneath our feet?  This habit—­why, it was once a passion!  This fact—­why, it was once a dream!”

Oh, why shake off youth’s fragile blossoms with the very speed of your own impatience!  Why make such haste towards autumn!  Who ever thought the ruddiest lapful of apples a fair exchange for a cloud of sunlit blossom?  Whose maturity, however laden with prosperity or gilded with honour, ever kept the fairy promise of his youth?  For so brief a space youth glitters like a dewdrop on the tree of life, glitters and is gone.  For one desperate instant of perfection it hangs poised, and is seen no more.