Oh, speed the day, thou dear, dear May,

and gaze humbly through tears at her own face in the glass loving it on his behalf.  She took her passion with the weight of a thing ordained; she had come upon it where it waited for her, and they had gone on together, carrying the secret.  There might be farther to go, but the way could never be long.

Finlay said when he came in that the heat for May was extraordinary; and Advena reminded him that he was in a country where everything was accomplished quickly, even summer.

“Except perhaps civilization.” she added.  They were both young enough to be pleased with cleverness for its specious self.

“Oh, that is slow everywhere,” he observed; “but how you can say so, with every modern improvement staring you in the face—­”

“Electric cars and telephones!  Oh, I didn’t say we hadn’t the products,” and she laughed.  “But the thing itself, the precious thing; that never comes just by wishing, does it?  The art of indifference, the art of choice—­”

“If you had refinements in the beginning what would the end be?” he demanded.  “Anaemia.”

“Oh, I don’t quarrel with the logic of it.  I only point out the fact.  To do that is to acquiesce, really.  I acquiesce; I have to.  But one may long for the more delicate appreciations that seem to flower where life has gone on longer.”

“I imagine,” Finlay said, “that to wish truly and ardently for such things is to possess them.  If you didn’t possess them you wouldn’t desire them!  As they say, as they say—­”

“As they say?”

“About love.  Some novelist does.  To be conscious in any way toward it is to be fatally infected.”

“What novelist?” Advena asked, with shining interest.

“Some novelist.  I—­I can’t have invented it,” he replied, somewhat confounded.  He got up and walked to the window, where it stood open upon the verandah.  “I don’t write novels,” he said.

“Perhaps you live them,” suggested Advena.  “I mean, of course,” she added, laughing, “the highest class of fiction.”

“Heaven forbid!”

“Why Heaven forbid?  You are sensitive to life, and a great deal of it comes into your scope.  You can’t see a thing truly without feeling it; you can’t feel it without living it.  I don’t write novels either, but I experience—­whole publishers’ lists.”

“That means,” he said, smiling, “that your vision is up to date.  You see the things, the kind of things that you read of next day.  The modern moral sophistications—?”

“Don’t make me out boastful,” she replied.  “I often do.”

“Mine would be old-fashioned, I am afraid.  Old stories of pain”—­he looked out upon the lawn, white where the chestnut blossoms were dropping, and his eyes were just wistful enough to stir her adoration—­“and of heroism that is quite dateless in the history of the human heart.  At least one likes to hope so.”