of a sort of beautiful, divine wonder at what I am, at what love is, at what it means for a man and a woman to live together as we live. Yet, folded to me thus, she also craves a still larger fulfilment. Often she appears to be vainly hovering on the outside of a too solid sphere, seeking an entrance to where I really am. Even during the intimate silences of the night we try to reach one another through the throbbing walls of flesh--we but cling together across the lone, impassable gulfs of individual being. During these October nights the moon has reached its fulness and the earth been flooded with beauty. Our bed is placed near a window; and as the planet sinks across the sky its rays stream through the open shutter and fall upon Georgiana in her sleep. Sometimes I lie awake for the sole chance of seeing them float upon her hair, pass lingeringly across her face, and steal holily downward along her figure. How august she is in her purity! The whiteness of the fairest cloud that brushes the silvering orb is as pitch to the whiteness of her nature. The other night as I lay watching her thus, and while the lower part of the bed remained in deep shadow, I could see that the thin covering had slipped aside, leaving Georgiana's feet exposed. With a start of pain I recollected an old story about her childhood: that one day for the sake of her rights she had received a wound in one of her feet--how serious I had never known, but perhaps deforming, irremediable. My head was raised on the pillow; the moonlight was moving down that way; it would cross her feet; it would reveal the truth. I turned my face away and closed my eyes. V It is nearly dark when I reach home from town these January evenings. However the cold may sting the face and dart inward to the marrow, Georgiana is waiting at the yard gate to meet me, so hooded and shawled and ringed about with petticoats--like a tree within its layers of bark--that she looks like the most thick-set of ordinary sized women; for there is a heavenly but very human secret hiding in this household now, and she is thoughtfully keeping it. "We press our half-frozen cheeks together, as red as wine-sap apples, and grope for each other's hand through our big lamb's-wool mittens, and warm our hearts with the laughter in each other's eyes. One evening she feigned to be mounted on guard, pacing to and fro inside the gate, against which rested an enormous icicle. When I started to