She stood beneath the withered trees, beside the shattered fountain. The sad-faced ghosts peeped out at her from the broken windows of the little silent houses.

She wondered later why she had not been surprised to see him. But at the time it seemed to be in the order of things that she should look up and find him there.

She went to him with outstretched arms.

“I’m so glad you’ve come,” she said. “I was just wanting you.”

They sat on the stone step of the fountain, where they were sheltered from the wind; and she buttoned his long coat about him.

“Do you think you will go on doing it?” he asked, with a laugh.

“I’m so afraid,” she answered gravely. “That I shall come to love you too much: the home, the children and you. I shall have none left over.”

“There is an old Hindoo proverb,” he said: “That when a man and woman love they dig a fountain down to God.”

“This poor, little choked-up thing,” he said, “against which we are sitting; it’s for want of men and women drawing water, of children dabbling their hands in it and making themselves all wet, that it has run dry.”

She took his hands in hers to keep them warm. The nursing habit seemed to have taken root in her.

“I see your argument,” she said. “The more I love you, the deeper will be the fountain. So that the more Love I want to come to me, the more I must love you.”

“Don’t you see it for yourself?” he demanded.

She broke into a little laugh.

“Perhaps you are right,” she admitted. “Perhaps that is why He made us male and female: to teach us to love.”

A robin broke into a song of triumph. He had seen the sad-faced ghosts steal silently away.

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