What description can be given in words of that bond between two, when the woman stands near the foot of the upward slope of life, and the man is already passing down on the sunset side, with lengthening afternoon shadows on the gray of his temples—­between them the cold separating peaks of a generation?

Such a generation of toiling years separated Professor Hardage from Isabel Conyers.  When, at the age of twenty, she returned after years of absence in an eastern college—­it was a tradition of her family that its women should be brilliantly educated—­he verged upon fifty.  To his youthful desires that interval was nothing; but to his disciplined judgment it was everything.

“Even though it could be,” he said to himself, “it should not be, and therefore it shall not.”

His was an idealism that often leaves its holder poor indeed save in the possession of its own incorruptible wealth.  No doubt also the life-long study of the ideals of classic time came to his guidance now with their admonitions of exquisite balance, their moderation and essential justness.

But after he had given up all hope of her, he did not hesitate to draw her to him in other ways; and there was that which drew her unfathomably to him—­all the more securely since in her mind there was no thought that the bond between them would ever involve the possibility of love and marriage.

His library became another home to her.  One winter she read Greek with him—­authors not in her college course.  Afterward he read much more Greek to her.  Then they laid Greek aside, and he took her through the history of its literature and through that other noble one, its deathless twin.

When she was not actually present, he yet took her with him through the wide regions of his studies—–­set her figure in old Greek landscapes and surrounded it with dim shapes of loveliness—­saw her sometimes as the perfection that went into marble—­made her a portion of legend and story, linking her with Nausicaa and Andromache and the lost others.  Then quitting antiquity with her altogether, he passed downward with her into the days of chivalry, brought her to Arthur’s court, and invested her with one character after another, trying her by the ladies of knightly ideals—­reading her between the lines in all the king’s idyls.

But last and best, seeing her in the clear white light of her own country and time—­as the spirit of American girlhood, pure, refined, faultlessly proportioned in mental and physical health, full of kindness, full of happiness, made for love, made for motherhood.  All this he did in his hopeless and idealizing worship of her; and all this and more he hid away:  for he too had his crypt.

So watching her and watching vainly over her, he was the first to see that she was loved and that her nature was turning away from him, from all that he could offer—­subdued by that one other call.

“Now, Fates,” he said, “by whatsoever names men have blindly prayed to you; you that love to strike at perfection, and pass over a multitude of the ordinary to reach the rare, stand off for a few years!  Let them be happy together in their love, their marriage, and their young children.  Let the threads run freely and be joyously interwoven.  Have mercy at least for a few years!”