o far as I've noticed."

"No; I haven't."

"You should have."

"Probably. But I can't, somehow, adjust myself to that advice as coming
from you."

"Because you don't understand what I'm getting at. It isn't religious
advice."

"Then what is it?"

"Literary, purely. You're going to write, some day. Oh, don't look
doubtful! That's foreordained. It doesn't take a seeress to prophesy
that. And the Bible is the one book that a writer ought to read every
day. Isaiah, Psalms, Proverbs. Pretty much all the Old Testament, and a
lot of the New. It has grown into our intellectual life until its
phrases and catchwords are full of overtones and sub-meanings. You've
got to have it in your business; your coming business, I mean. I know
what I'm talking about, Mr. Errol Banneker--_moi qui parle_. They
offered me an instructorship in Literature when I graduated. I even
threatened to take it, just for a joke on Dad. _Now_, will you be good
and accept my fully explained and diagrammed Bible without fearing that
I have designs on your soul?"

"Yes."

"And will you please go back to your work at once, and by and by take me
home and stay to supper? Miss Van Arsdale told me to ask you."

"All right. I'll be glad to. What will you do between now and four
o'clock?"

"Prowl in your library and unearth more of your secrets."

"You're welcome if you can find any. I don't deal in 'em."

When Banneker, released from his duties until evening train time,
rejoined her, and they were riding along the forest trail, he said:

"You've started me to theorizing about myself."

"Do it aloud," she invited.

"Well; all my boyhood I led a wandering life, as you know. We were never
anywhere as much as a month at a time. In a way, I liked the change and
adventure. In another way, I got dead sick of it. Don't you suppose that
my readiness to settle down and vegetate is the reaction from that?"

"It sounds reasonable enough. You might put it more simply by saying
that you were tired. But by now you ought to be rested."

"Therefore I ought to be stirring myself so as to get tired again?"

"If you don't stir, you'll rust."

"Rust is a painless death for useless mechanism."

She shot an impatient side-glance at him. "Either you're a hundred years
old," she said, "or that's sheer pose."

"Perhaps it is a sort of pose. If so, it's a self-protective one."

"Suppose I asked you to come to New York?"

Intrepid though she was, her soul quaked a