tter clutched in his hand, he bent forward and pillowed his
hot face in his arms, outspread upon his father's old desk. He wanted
to weep--to sob aloud in a childish effort to unburden his heart,
scourged now with the first real sorrow of his existence. His throat
contracted; something in his breast appeared to have congealed, yet
for upward of an hour he neither moved nor gave forth a sound. At
last, under the inspiration of a great hope that came apparently
without any mental effort or any desire for hope, so thoroughly
crushed was he, the black, touseled head came slowly up. His face,
usually ruddy beneath the dark, suntanned skin but now white and
haggard, showed a fleeting little smile, as if he grinned at his own
weakness and lack of faith; he rose unsteadily and clumped out of the
office-building.

Gone! Nan gone--like that! No, no! He would not believe it. She might
have intended to go--she might have wanted to go--she might even have
started to go--but she had turned back! She loved him; she was his.
During those long days and nights up in the woods, he had fought the
issue with himself and made up his mind that Nan Brent was the one
woman in the world for him, that there could never, by God's grace, be
any other, and that he would have her, come what might and be the
price what it would. Rather than the fortune for which his father had
toiled and sacrificed, Donald preferred Nan's love; rather than a life
of ease and freedom from worry, he looked forward with a fierce joy to
laboring with his hands for a pittance, provided he might have the
privilege of sharing it with her. And The Dreamerie, the house his
father had built with such great, passionate human hopes and tender
yearnings, the young laird of Port Agnew could abandon without a pang
for that little white house on the Sawdust Pile. Round steak and
potatoes, fried by the woman destined to him for his perfect mate,
would taste better to him than the choicest viands served by light
stepping servitors in his father's house.

What, after all, was there worth while in the world for him if he was
to be robbed of his youth and his love? For him, the bare husks of
life held no allurement; he was one of that virile, human type that
rejects the doctrine of sacrifice, denial, and self-repression in this
life for the greater glory of God and man's promise of a reward in
another life, of which we wot but little and that little not
scientifically authenticated. He