man might give up
a good deal for."

"Oh, how can you take such a cruel disappointment so?" she breathed.
"And to hear it just at Christmas, too. I've said all along that you
were just the bravest person I ever knew. But now!--Jerry, I'm not
worthy to be your friend."

"Ah, I'll not let you take back what you offered me. If you knew how
I've wanted to ask it----"

"Have you, really?" she asked so eagerly that he turned his head away
for a moment and set his lips firmly together as if he feared he might
presently be tempted to go beyond those strait boundaries of friendship.
Somehow from the lips of such a girl as Nan this sort of thing was the
most appealing flattery; at the same time it was unquestionably sincere.

"So you will seal the compact? Think it over carefully. I can never give
you the strong arm a well man could."

"If you will teach me to acquire the sort of strength you have learned
yourself," she said--and there was a hint of mistiness about those eyes
of hers--"you will have given me something worth while."

Presently they were talking of her journey, to be begun on the morrow;
of her work, in which she had come in the last year to remarkable
success; of his work--the part which he could do and would continue to
do, he said, with added vigour. They talked quietly but earnestly, and
each time she looked up into his face she saw there a new brightness,
something beyond the mere patient acceptance of his hard trial.

"Jerry," she said all at once, breaking off in the midst of a discussion
of certain phases of the illustrator's art, "you don't know how suddenly
rich I feel. All the while you were doing such wonderful, beautiful
things with your pen in New York and being made so much of, I was
thinking, 'What an inspiration Jerrold Fullerton would be as a real
friend.' But all the girls were----"

He laughed. "They won't trouble you, now."

"But your friendship is worth more now than then."

He shook his head.

"It is--because _you_ are more than you were then."

"I'm a mere wreck of what I was, Nan." He did not say it bitterly, but
he could not quite keep the sadness out of the uncompromising phrase.

She looked up at him, studying his face intently. It had always been a
remarkably fine face, and on it the suffering of the past year had done
a certain work which added to its beauty. He did not look ill, but the
refinement which illness sometimes lends to faces of a somewhat too
strongly cut t