o care?" he persisted, brutally.

"Yes," she answered, defiantly.

"Well, I don't care about fool laws--they are mighty thin stuff. I
love you," he told her with quiet emphasis.

Mary did not answer but the purple of the eyes changed back to stormy
gray.

"Why don't you say something? Abuse me, claim me----"

"I haven't the courage even if I have the right," she said, presently.
"Besides, the last year I have been loving an ideal--the Steve
O'Valley who existed one time and might still exist if other things
were equal. But in reality you are a prematurely nerve-shattered,
blundering pirate; not my Steve." She spoke his name softly. "The
failure of my ideal--and it's a little hard to live with and work
with such a failure. My hands are tied, yet my eyes see. Besides,
there is Luke to think about and care for until some other woman does
it. I cannot endure this tangle; neither can I get you out of it.
So I am going away. And I'll keep on loving my ideal and find the
old-lavender-and-star-dust sort of peace."

"You are not going!" he repeated, sharply, taking her hand. "Do you
hear? I love you. I have loved you enough to keep silent about it ever
since that day. Does it mean nothing to you?"

"Don't say it again--it is so hopeless, part of the tangle. You
haven't the faintest idea how hopeless it is; you are so involved you
cannot judge. My boy, don't you see that the whole trouble lies in
getting things you have never earned? The sort of joy you people
indulge in and try to hold as your own is a state of mind and emotion
from which no lessons may be learned--calm, stagnant pools of
superlative surface pleasure. No one learns things worth while when
he is too happy or too successful. That is why success is a wiser and
more enduring thing when it comes at middle age. The young man or
woman has not been tried out, has not had to struggle and discover
personal limitations. It's the struggle that brings the wisdom.

"But when you have a ready-made stock-market fortune handed to you,
and a Gorgeous Girl wife, and the world comes to fawn upon you--you
soon become intoxicated with a false sense of your own achievements
and values. It does not last--nor does it pay. Such joy periods are
merely recuperative periods. By and by something comes along and bumps
into you and you are shoved out into the struggling seas--the learning
and conquering game. It is not a sad state of affairs--but a mighty
wise one. Then how can you,