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It was a transparent July afternoon, with white and gray clouds drifting across a clear blue sky, and a southwesterly breeze roughening the dark waves and showing their white shoulders. Mary Leithe and Drayton came slowly along the rocks, he assisting her to climb or descend the more rugged places, and occasionally pausing with her to watch the white canvas of a yacht shiver in the breeze as she went about, or to question whether yonder flash amid the waves, where the gulls were hovering and dipping, were a bluefish breaking water. At length they reached a little nook in the seaward face, which, by often resorting to it, they had in a manner made their own. It was a small shelf in the rock, spacious enough for two to sit in at ease, with a back to lean against, and at one side a bit of level ledge which served as a stand or table. Before them was the sea, which, at high-water mark, rose to within three yards of their feet; while from the shoreward side they were concealed by the ascending wall of sandstone. Drayton had brought a cushion with him, which he arranged in Mary’s seat; and when they had established themselves, he took a volume of Emerson’s poems from his pocket and laid it on the rock beside him.

“Are you comfortable?” he asked.

“Yes; I wish it would be always like this–the weather, and the sun, and the time–so that we might stay here forever.”

“Forever is the least useful word in human language,” observed Drayton. “In the perspective of time, a few hours, or days, or years, seem alike inconsiderable.”

“But it is not the same to our hearts, which live forever,” she returned.

“The life of the heart is love,” said Drayton.

“And that lasts forever,” said Mary Leithe.

“True love lasts, but the object changes,” was his reply.

“It seems to change sometimes,” said she.

“But I think it is only our perception that is misled. We think we have found what we love; but afterward, perhaps, we find it was not in the person we supposed, but in some other. Then we love it in him; not because our heart has changed, but just because it has not.”

“Has that been your experience?” Drayton asked, with a smile.

“Oh, I was speaking generally,” she said, looking down.

“It may be the truth; but if so, it is a perilous thing to be loved.”

“Perilous?”

“Why, yes. How can the lover be sure that he really is what his mistress takes him for? After all, a man has and is nothing in himself. His life, his love, his goodness, such as they are, flow into him from his Creator, in such measure as he is capable or desirous of receiving them. And he may receive more at one time than at another. How shall he know when he may lose the talismanic virtue that won her love–even supposing he ever possessed it?”

“I don’t know how to argue,” said Mary Leithe; “I can only feel when a thing is true or not–or when I think it is–and say what I feel.”

“Well, I am wise enough to trust the truth of your feeling before any argument.”

This assertion somewhat disconcerted Mary Leithe, who never liked to be confronted with her own shadow, so to speak. However, she seemed resolved on this occasion to give fuller utterance than usual to what was in her mind; so, after a pause, she continued, “It is not only how much we are capable of receiving from God, but the peculiar way in which each one of us shows what is in him, that makes the difference in people. It is not the talisman so much as the manner of using it that wins a girl’s love. And she may think one manner good until she comes to know that another is better.”

“And, later, that another is better still?”

“You trust my feeling less than you thought, you see,” said Mary, blushing, and with a tremor of her lips.