e edge of
things out there: it was a mistake, Tom; you were in the very heart of
them."

He shook his head.

"No; the heart of them was back yonder in the music-room. There were
chaos and thick darkness to go before that day of days; and it was your
woman's love that changed the world for me."

"No," she denied; "that was only an incident. When chaos and darkness
fled away, it was God who said, 'Let there be light.' The dawn had come
for you before our day of days, Tom."

He stretched himself luxuriously on the sward at her feet.

"You may put it that way if you please. But I shall go on revering you
as my torch-bearer," he asserted.

"Tell me," she said quickly; "was it for my sake that you spared Vincent
Farley when all you had to do was to turn your back and go away?"

He took time to consider, and his answer put love under the foot of
truth.

"No, it wasn't. If you make me confess the bald fact, I was not thinking
of you at all, just at that one moment."

"I know it," she rejoined. "And I am big enough to be glad. Neither was
it for my sake that you instructed your lawyers to return good for evil
by redeeming the Farleys' stock just before they left for Colorado, or
that you made restitution to the families of the men at Gordonia for
their losses during the strike."

But again he was shaking his head dubiously.

"I'm not so sure about that. It's in any man to play high when the good
opinion of the one woman is the stake. I'm a _poseur_, like all the
others."

She smiled down on him and the slate-blue eyes were reading him to the
latest-indited heart-line.

"You are posing now," she asseverated. "Don't I know?--don't I always
and always know?" And, after a reflective moment: "It is a great comfort
to be able to love the poses, and a still greater to be permitted to
discern the true man under them."

"I am glad to believe that you don't see quite to the bottom of that
well, Ardea, girl," he said with sudden gravity. "I get only occasional
glimpses, myself, and they make me seasick. I don't believe any man
alive could endure it to look long into the inner abysses of himself."

"'The heart knoweth his own bitterness,'" she quoted, speaking softly;
and then--O rarest of women!--she did not enlarge on it. Instead--

Silence while she was gathering the sweet-smelling tangle in her lap
into some more portable arrangement. And afterward, when they were
drifting slowly homeward in the lengthening shadows,