I shook my head.

"Page wrote it--Curtis Hidden Page, I think. Well, it was that bit of
verse that gave me the clue. One day, in the window-seat near the big
piano--you remember how she could play? She used to laugh, sometimes, and
doubt whether it was for them I came, or for the music. She called me a
'music-sot' once, a 'sound-debauchee.' What a voice he had! When he sang
I believed in immortality, my regard for the gods grew almost patronizing
and I devised ways and means whereby I surely could outwit them and their
tricks.

"It was a spectacle for God, that man and woman, years married, and singing
love-songs with a freshness virginal as new-born Love himself, with a
ripeness and wealth of ardour that young lovers can never know. Young
lovers were pale and anaemic beside that long-married pair. To see them,
all fire and flame and tenderness, at a trembling distance, lavishing
caresses of eye and voice with every action, through every silence--their
love driving them toward each other, and they withholding like fluttering
moths, each to the other a candle-flame, and revolving each about the other
in the mad gyrations of an amazing orbit-flight! It seemed, in obedience
to some great law of physics, more potent than gravitation and more subtle,
that they must corporeally melt each into each there before my very eyes.
Small wonder they were called the wonderful lovers.

"I have wandered. Now to the clue. One day in the window-seat I found a
book of verse. It opened of itself, betraying long habit, to 'Love's
Waiting Time.' The page was thumbed and limp with overhandling, and there
I read:--