PROLOGUE.

"What is the use of it?" the Poet demanded peevishly—it was New Year's Day in the morning. "People don't read my poetry when I have gone to the trouble of writing it!"

"The more shame to them," said his wife.

"But, my dear, you know you never read it yourself."

"Oh, that is altogether different. Besides you are improving, are you not?" She asked it a trifle anxiously, but the question set him off at once.

"In twenty years' time—" he began eagerly.

"—The boy will be at college." She laid down her needle and embroidery and, gazing into the fire, let her hands lie idle in her lap.

"You might think of me."

"I thought," she answered, "you were doing that."

"Of yourself, then."

"In twenty years' time—" She broke off with the faintest possible sigh.

The Poet jumped up and went to his writing-desk. "That reminds me," he said, and produced a folded scrap of paper. "I wrote it last night. It's a sort of a little New Year's present—you need not read it, you know."

"But I will": and she took the paper and read—