ked and become
reminiscent, and had been soaked by a summer rain. They had been boys
again. Of the two, Markham had been the more buoyant and more reckless.
He had been a sick man, though still upon his legs and among his
fellows, when Payne had found him. Things had been going wrong with
Markham. His equation with Her had been disturbed.

It had been a test, there was no doubt of that, especially of the woman,
the relations between Markham and her who had come to be more to him
than he had ever before known or imagined one human being could be to
another. She loved him; she had confessed that in a sweet, womanly way,
but there was an obstacle between them. Before she could become his,
there was something for him to accomplish; something hard, perplexing,
and difficult in every way. He had not been idle. He had laid the
foundations for his structure of happiness, but foundations do not
reveal themselves as do upper stories, and she could not see the careful
stonework. The domes and minarets of the castle for which she may have
longed were not in sight. He alone knew what had been his work, but she
was hardly satisfied. And, then, suddenly, because of a disturbing
fancy, founded on a fact which was yet not a fact in its relations, she
had become another being. One thing, meaning much, she had done, which
took from the man his strength. It was as if his heart had been drained
of its blood. He was not himself. He groped mentally. Was there no
faithful love in woman; no love like his, which could not help itself
and was without alternative? Were women less than men, and was
calculation or instability a possibility with the sweetest and the
noblest of them? No boy was this; he had known very many women very
well, but he was helpless as a babe in the new world he had found when
he met this one who had become so much. She had changed him mentally and
morally, and even physically, for he had been a careless liver, and she
had turned him from his drifting into a better course. She had made him,
and now, had he been a weaker man, she would have unmade him. And he had
become ill because of it, and almost desperate. Then came the evidence
that she was a woman, as good women are dreamed of, after all; and they
understood, and had come close together to hope again. It gave him life
once more. There was, and would be, the memory of the lapse, but scars
do not cripple. He was himself again. He was thinking of it all, as he
lay late in