lf and there will be no
one to bother you all the rest of your life."

"Where are we going?" Her weak voice sounded pitifully glad.

"I'm not sure--but somewhere for away--Canada, or California, or some
big, wild country where we can ride about all day and imagine ourselves
back in dear old Ireland again."

She sighed with pleasure; and two minutes later fell asleep with a
tender little smile upon her lips.

CHAPTER XXIX

On a beautiful evening in June, when the land was sweet with roses, and
the cuckoos called insistently to one another from copse and wood, Owen
Rose brought his wife home, for the second time, to Greenriver.

They had spent the intervening weeks in Italy; and to the end of her
life Toni would look upon those glorious Italian days as her true
honeymoon.

Now, indeed, she and Owen were really lovers, meeting on an equal ground
through the very force of their mutual love. Gone for ever were the old
doubts and misunderstandings, the miserable fooling of inferiority on
Toni's side, the half-unconscious irritation with which Owen had viewed
what seemed to be his wife's limitations.

No miracle had been worked. Toni and Owen both knew very well that in
literary matters Owen would always be superior to Toni; but now that
they were one in ambition, one in feeling, one in heart and soul, this
superiority mattered little.

Now that she was no longer frightened, no longer felt herself despised,
Toni could give her natural intelligence full play; and when once Owen
took the trouble to study Toni closely, he thanked his gods that he had
discovered her worth before it was too late.

What he had taken for stupidity was only diffidence. Toni's brain,
though not so highly specialized as his own, was a very capable, quick
organ all the same; and in the lonely, dreary months of her absence Owen
had learned to value at their true worth the precious gifts of laughter
and sunny, unselfish gaiety which had once lightened the stately old
house. When Toni disappeared, it seemed as though a living sunbeam had
deserted the household; and when, on announcing the news of her safety
and ultimate return, he had seen the faces of the servants break into
relieved smiles, Owen had felt, with a twinge of shame, that even her
dependants had valued Toni more than he, her husband, had known how to
do.

Always, too, the remembrance of the significance of Toni's sacrifice
would keep Owen humble before her. He knew now, b