and green meadows, and roses by the door, and
we'll stay there and it will be--_home_!"

"Yes," he nodded, understanding the feeling better than she knew. "You
and mother; you want it just that way."

"How did you know it was mother?" she asked, turning to him with a
quick, appreciative little start.

"You're the kind of a woman who has a mother," he answered. "Mothers
leave their stamp on women like you."

"Thank you," said she.

"I've often wanted to run away from it that way, too," he owned, "for
failure made a coward of me more than once in those hard years. There's
a prospect of independence and peace in the picture you make with those
few swift strokes. But I don't see any--you haven't put any--any--_man_
in it. Isn't there one somewhere?"

"No," simply and frankly; "there isn't any man anywhere. He doesn't
belong in the picture, so why should I draw him in?"

Dr. Slavens sighed.

"Yes; I've wanted to run away from it more than once."

"That's because you've lost your nerve," she charged. "You shouldn't
want to run away from it--a big, broad man like you--and you must not
run away. You must stay and fight--and fight--and _fight_! Why, you talk
as if you were seventy instead of a youth of thirty-five!"

"Don't rub it in so hard on that failure and nerve business," he begged,
ashamed of his hasty confession.

"Well, _you_ mustn't talk of running away then. There are no ghosts
after you, are there?"

The moonlight was sifting through the loose strands of her gleaming hair
as she sat there bareheaded at his side, and the strength of his life
reached out to her, and the deep yearning of his lonely soul. He knew
that he wanted that woman out of all the world full of women whom he had
seen and known--and passed. He knew that he wanted her with such strong
need that from that day none other could come across the mirror of his
heart and dim her image out of it.

Simply money would not win a woman like her; no slope-headed son of a ham
factory could come along and carry her off without any recommendation but
his cash. She had lived through that kind of lure, and she was there on
his own level because she wanted to work out her clean life in her own
clean way. The thought warmed him. Here was a girl, he reflected, with a
piece of steel in her backbone; a girl that would take the world's
lashings like a white elm in a storm, to spring resiliently back to
stately poise after the turmoil had passed. Trouble woul