me--all the times you've climbed this steep hill just to
talk to me for an hour and give me new strength to go on."

"It's only selfishness, Rosemary. I knew you were here and I like to
talk to you. Don't forget that you've meant something to me, too. Why,
you're the only woman I know, except my mother."

"Your mother is lovely," she returned. "I wish I could go to see her
once in a while. I like to look at her. Even her voice is different
someway."

"Yes, mother is 'different,'" he agreed, idly. "It's astonishing,
sometimes, how 'different' she manages to be. We had it out the other
day, about the vineyard, and I'm to stay here--all the rest of my life,"
he concluded bitterly.

"I don't see why, if you don't want to," she answered, half-fearfully.
"You're a man, and men can do as they please."

"It probably seems so to you, but I assure you it's very far from the
truth. I wonder, now and then, if any of us ever really do as we please.
Freedom is the great gift."

[Sidenote: Choosing]

"And the great loneliness," she added, after a pause.

"You may be right," he sighed. "Still, I'd like to try it for a while.
It's the one thing I'd choose. What would you take, if you could have
anything you wanted?"

"Do you mean for just a little while, or for always?"

"For always. The one great gift you'd choose from all that Life has to
give."

"I'd take love," she said, in a low tone. She was not looking at him
now, but far across the valley where the vineyard lay. Her face was
wistful in the half-light; the corners of her mouth quivered, ever so
little.

Alden looked at her, then rubbed his eyes and looked at her again. In
some subtle way she had changed, or he had, since they last met. Never
before had he thought of her as a woman; she had been merely another
individual to whom he liked to talk. To-day her womanhood carried its
own appeal. She was not beautiful and no one would ever think her so,
but she was sweet and wholesome and had a new, indefinable freshness
about her that, in another woman, would have been called charm.

It came to him, all at once, that, in some mysterious way, he and
Rosemary belonged together. They had been born to the same lot, and must
spend all their days in the valley, hedged in by the same narrow
restrictions. Even an occasional hour on the Hill of the Muses was
forbidden to her, and constant scheming was the price she was obliged to
pay for it.

[Sidenote: The Book]

The rest