n Sally's ears.
Jim Templeton had touched her in some distant and intimate corner of her
nature where none other had reached; and in all her gay life, when men
had told their tale of admiration in their own way, her mind had gone
back to Jim, and what he had said under the magnolia trees; and his
voice had drowned all others. She was not blind to what he had become,
but a deep belief possessed her that she, of all the world, could save
him. She knew how futile it would look to the world, how wild a dream
it looked even to her own heart, how perilous it was; but, play upon
the surface of things as she had done so much and so often in her brief
career, she was seized of convictions having origin, as it might seem,
in something beyond herself.

So when she and Jim met in the street, the old true thing rushed upon
them both, and for a moment they stood still and looked at each other.
As they might look who say farewell forever, so did each dwell upon the
other's face. That was the beginning of the new epoch. A few days more,
and Jim came to her and said that she alone could save him; and she
meant him to say it, had led him to the saying, for the same conviction
was burned deep in her own soul. She knew the awful risk she was taking,
that the step must mean social ostracism, and that her own people would
be no kinder to her than society; but she gasped a prayer, smiled at Jim
as though all were well, laid her plans, made him promise her one thing
on his knees, and took the plunge.

Her people did as she expected. She was threatened with banishment from
heart and home--with disinheritance; but she pursued her course; and the
only person who stood with her and Jim at the altar was John Appleton,
who would not be denied, and who had such a half-hour with Jim before
the ceremony as neither of them forgot in the years that the locust ate
thereafter. And, standing at the altar, Jim's eyes were still wet, with
new resolves in his heart and a being at his side meant for the best man
in the world. As he knelt beside her, awaiting the benediction, a sudden
sense of the enormity of this act came upon him, and for her sake he
would have drawn back then, had it not been too late. He realised that
it was a crime to put this young, beautiful life in peril; that his own
life was a poor, contemptible thing, and that he had been possessed of
the egotism of the selfish and the young.

But the thing was done, and a new life was begun. Before