of wild nature, with the seasons in his face, with the blood of the planet rising into his veins as intimately as it pours into a spring oak or into an autumn grape-vine.  I often heard Professor Hardage call him the earth-born.  He never called any one else that.  He was wild with happiness until he went to college.  He came back all changed; and life has been uphill with him ever since.  Lately things have grown worse.  The other day I was working on the plan of our house; he came in and looked over my shoulder:  ‘Don’t build, Dent,’ he said, ‘bring your wife here,’ and he walked quickly out of the room.  I knew what that meant:  he has been unfortunate in his love affair and is ready to throw up the whole idea of marrying.  This is our trouble, Pansy.  It may explain anything that may have been lacking in my mother’s treatment of you; she is not herself at all.”  He spoke with great tenderness and he looked disturbed.

“Can I do anything?” What had she been all her life but burden-bearer, sorrow-sharer?

“Nothing.”

“If I ever can, will you tell me?”

“This is the only secret I have kept from you, Pansy.  I am sure you have kept none from me.  I believe that if I could read everything in you, I should find nothing I did not wish to know.”

She did not reply for a while.  Then she said solemnly:  “I have one secret.  There is something I try to hide from every human being and I always shall.  It is not a bad secret, Dent.  But I do not wish to tell you what it is, and I feel sure you will never ask me.”

He turned his eyes to her clear with unshakable confidence:  “I never will.”

Pansy was thinking of her mother’s poverty.

They sat awhile in silence.

He had pulled some stems of seeding grass and drew them slowly across his palm, pondering Life.  Then he began to talk to her in the way that made them so much at home with one another.

“Pansy, men used to speak of the secrets of Nature:  there is not the slightest evidence that Nature has a secret.  They used to speak of the mysteries of the Creator.  I am not one of those who claim to be authorities on the traits of the Creator.  Some of my ancestors considered themselves such.  But I do say that men are coming more and more to think of Him as having no mysteries.  We have no evidence, as the old hymn declares, that He loves to move in a mysterious way.  The entire openness of Nature and of the Creator—­these are the new ways of thinking.  They will be the only ways of thinking in the future unless civilization sinks again into darkness.  What we call secrets and mysteries of the universe are the limitations of our powers and our knowledge.  The little that we actually do know about Nature, how open it is, how unsecretive!  There is nowhere a sign that the Creator wishes to hide from us even what is Life.  If we ever discover what Life is, no doubt we shall then realize that it contained no mystery.”