y wandered away, and whispered a hope, perhaps a promise; for as it
touched them each tall stalk nodded gayly and the box hedges rustled
delicately an answering undertone. And just at the edge of the woodland,
before they were out of sight, the girl turned and threw a kiss back to
the roses and the box.

"I always do that," she said. "I love them so!"

Two weeks later a great train rolled into the Grand Central Station of
New York at half-past six at night, and from it stepped a monstrosity--a
young man without a heart. He had left all of it, more than he had
thought he owned, in Kentucky. But he had brought back with him memories
which gave him more joy than ever the heart had done, to his best
knowledge, in all the years. They were memories of long and sunshiny
days; of afternoons spent in the saddle, rushing through grassy lanes
where trumpet-flowers flamed over gray farm fences, or trotting slowly
down white roads; of whole mornings only an hour long, passed in the
enchanted stillness of an old garden; of gay, desultory searches through
its length and breadth, and in the park that held it, for buried
treasure: of moonlit nights; of roses and June and Kentucky--and always,
through all the memories, the presence that made them what they were,
that of a girl he loved.

No word of love had been spoken, but the two weeks had made over his
life; and he went back to his work with a definite object, a hope
stronger than ambition, and, set to it as music to words, came
insistently another hope, a dream that he did not let himself dwell
on--a longing to make enough money to pay off the mortgage and put
Fairfield in order, and live and work there all his life--with Shelby.
That was where the thrill of the thought came in, but the place was very
dear to him in itself.

The months went, and the point of living now were the mails from the
South, and the feast days were the days that brought letters from
Fairfield. He had promised to go back for a week at Christmas, and he
worked and hoarded all the months between with a thought which he did
not formulate, but which ruled his down-sitting and his up-rising, the
thought that if he did well and his bank account grew enough to justify
it he might, when he saw her at Christmas, tell her what he hoped; ask
her--he finished the thought with a jump of his heart. He never worked
harder or better, and each check that came in meant a step toward the
promised land; and each seemed for th