Now he clasped his hands, and interrupted her, "Things certainly are not going on quite right--but I ought to be used to it.

What I meant to have confided to you in a quiet hour, you tell me as if you knew all about it!" "And why not ?" asked Dorothea.

"When you graft a scion on to a tree, and they have grown well together, the grafted branch feels the bite of the saw that divides the stock, or the blessing of the spring that feeds the roots, just as if the pain or the boon were its own.

And you are the tree and I am the graft, and the magic power of marriage has made us one.

Your pulses are my pulses, your thoughts have become mine, and so I always know before you tell me what it is that stirs your soul." Dorothea's kind eyes moistened as she spoke, and Petrus warmly clasped her hands in his as he said, "And if the gnarled old trunk bears from time to time some sweet fruit, he may thank the graft for it.