But as the years blossom, bloom, and fade in
their quick succession, the day will come when we shall ask of her only
the balm and be glad to leave the poison hidden, and to forget how we
would have used it in old days--when we shall ask her only to give us
the memory of a dear and gentle hand--dear still but no longer kind--of
the voice that was once a harmony, and whose harsh discord is almost
music still--of the hour when love was twofold, stainless and supreme.
Those things we shall ask of her and she, in her wonderful tenderness,
will give them to us again--in dreams, waking or sleeping, in the sunlit
silence of lonely places, in soft nights when the southern sea is still,
in the greater loneliness of the storm, when brave faces are set as
stone and freezing hands grasp frozen ropes, and the shadow of death
rises from the waves and stands between every man and his fellows. We
shall ask, and we shall receive. Out of noon-day shadow, out of the
starlit dusk, out of the driving spray of the midtempest, one face will
rise, one hand will touch our own, one loving, lingering glance will
meet ours from eyes that have no look of love for us in them now.
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