ood
looking at the floor in silence. The father took a spoonful of hot milk
with satisfaction, and, after the younger man had left the room, he
resumed his newspaper. He was particularly interested in the "Sunshine
Column," which dispensed sweetness and light under a poetic caption too
beautiful to be true in a coldly humorous world.

* * * * *

That afternoon Gordon Collis said abruptly to Neville:

"You look like the devil, Louis."

"Do I?"

"You certainly do." And, in a lower voice: "I guess I've heard what's
the matter. Don't worry. It's a thing about which nobody ever ought to
give anybody any advice--so I'll give you some. Marry whoever you damn
please. It'll be all the same after that oak I planted this morning is
half grown."

"Gordon," he said, surprised, "I didn't suppose _you_ were liberal."

"Liberal! Why, man alive! Do you think a fellow can live out of doors as
I have lived, and see germs sprout, and see mountain ranges decay, and
sit on a few glaciers, and swing a pick into a mother-lode--and _not_ be
liberal? Do you suppose ten-cent laws bother me when I'm up against the
blind laws that made the law-makers?--laws that made life itself before
Christ lived to conform to them?... I married where I loved. It chanced
that my marriage with your sister didn't clash with the sanctified order
of things in Manhattan town. But if your sister had been the maid who
dresses her, and I had loved her, I'd have married her all the same and
have gone about the pleasures and duties of procreation and conservation
exactly as I go about 'em now.... I wonder how much the Almighty was
thinking about Tenth Street when the first pair of anthropoids mated?
_Nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus_. If you love each other--_Noli
pugnare duobus._ ... And I'm going into the woods to look for ginseng.
Want to come?"

Neville went. Cameron and Stephanie, equipped with buckskin gloves, a
fox terrier, and digging apparatus, joined them just where the slender
meadow brook entered the woods.

"There are mosquitoes here!" exclaimed Cameron wrathfully. "All day and
every day I'm being stung down town, and I'm not going to stand for it
here!"

Stephanie let him aid her to the top of a fallen log, glancing back once
or twice toward Neville, who was sauntering forward among the trees,
pretending to look for ginseng.

"Do you notice how Louis has changed?" she said, keeping her balance on
the log. "I