Page:The cream of the jest; a comedy of evasions (IA creamofjestcomed00caberich).pdf/275

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in the sun's abating brilliance; but still you could hear its singing; and then, as suddenly, the bird dropped earthward.

Kennaston snapped his fingers. "Aha, my old acquaintance!" he said, "but now I envy you no longer!" Then he walked onward, thinking. . . .

"What did I think of?" he said, long afterward—"oh, of nothing with any real clarity. You see—I touched mystery everywhere. . . .

"But I thought of Kathleen's first kiss, and of the first time I came to her alone after we were married, and of our baby that was born dead. . . . I was happier than I had ever been in any dream. . . . I saw that the ties of our ordinary life here in the flesh have their own mystic strength and sanctity. I comprehended why in our highest sacrament we pre-figure with holy awe, not things of the mind and spirit, but flesh and blood. . . . A man and his wife, barring stark severance, grow with time to be one person, you see; and it is not so much the sort of person as the indivisibility that matters with them. . . .