what? First thing you know people'll begin to desire
things because they're worth desiring and not because other folks have
them--even so astonishing a flight as that!" he made a boyish
gesture--"and what a grand time that'll be to live in, to be sure!"

They were waiting at the corner for the doctor's street car, which now
came noisily down toward them. He watched it advance, and proffered as a
valedictory, his gloom untempered to the last, "You're a wild man that
lives in the woods. I've doctored everybody in the world for thirty
years. Which knows human nature best?"

Rankin roared after him defiantly, waking the echoes and startling the
occupants of the car, "I do! I do! I do!"

The car bore the doctor away, a perversely melancholy little figure,
contemplating the young people blackly.

"Whatever do you suppose set him off so?" Rankin wondered aloud as they
resumed their rapid, swinging walk through the cold air.

"I'm afraid I did," Lydia surmised. "I had a wretched fit of the blues,
and I guess he must have caught them from me."

Rankin looked down at her keenly, his thoughts apparently quite altered
by her phrase. "Ah, he worries a great deal about you," he murmured.

Lydia laughed nervously, and said nothing. They walked swiftly in
silence. The stars were thick above them in the wind-swept autumn night.
Lydia tilted her head to look up at them once or twice. She saw Rankin's
face pale under the shadow of his broad-brimmed hat, his eyes meeting
hers in an intent regard like a wordless speech. The fine, cold, austere
wind swept them along like leaves, whipping their young pulses, chanting
loudly in the leafless branches of the maples, and filling the dark
spaces above with a great humming roar. They thrilled responsive to all
this and to the mood of high seriousness each divined in the other.

Lydia's voice, breaking in upon the intimate silence, continued the
talk, but it was with another note. The mute interval, filled with wind
and darkness and the light of stars, had swung them up to a higher
plane. She spoke with an artless sureness of comprehension--a
certainty--they were close in spirit at that moment, and she was not
frightened, not even conscious of it. "Why should the doctor worry?
_What is the matter?_ Marietta says the trouble with me is that I'm
spoiled with having everything that I want."

"_Have_ you everything you want?" Rankin's bluntness of interrogation
was unmitigated.

Lydia looked