t your family are your enemies."

"And your heart refuses the thought of surrender?"

Anne looked at him quickly, and for her eyes he could no longer employ
the Blue Grotto as a simile. The waters there are shallow, and in that
moment of soul-unmasking he looked through her irises into deeps of
feeling, sincere and unalterable, and far down under fathoms of slighter
things into the basic pools of passion.

"You can hardly call it refusal," she said in a low voice, shaded with a
ghost-touch of indignation. "I have never considered it."

"So I had hoped," he responded gravely, "but I owe you the frankness of
admitting that I wasn't sure. On such subjects the boy has naturally
been reticent. I could be sure only of how _he_ felt. I wanted to see
him get on, and I knew what your influence would mean to him. It has
been what sunlight is to a place where the shadows lie too thick. In the
mountains, my dear, cows that browse where the sun doesn't penetrate get
'dew poisoning.' Human beings get it from the milk. To both it is often
fatal. There's dew poisoning in Boone's blood, too, from generations of
brooding shadows. He needed you."

He paused, and she bent forward. "Yes," she prompted softly.

"So I was glad for every moment he had with you--glad enough, even, to
endure the thought of what it might ultimately cost him in the usury of
heartache."

"And you were willing to let him undergo the heartache?" Her voice
perceptibly hardened. "I'm afraid that's a loyalty I can't understand."

"It's the loyalty of a soldier's faith in him," he responded briefly. "I
believed that if he must go through the fire he would come out of it not
slag, but good metal."

"If his heart has to ache,"--the girl's eyes were tender again--"it
won't be because I fail him."

"And, for the present, it is you who are paying the assessments of
heartache?"

"I guess it's not quite that bad,"--but her smile was forced. "I'm
merely being gloomed on by melancholy in the family circle as a
life-hope going to wreck. By a nod of my head--an acquiescent one to
Morgan--I could set the broken family fortunes up again beyond danger
and make everybody happy--except myself and Boone. They can't see
anything but sheer perversity in my refusal. They see me, as they think,
drifting on a sea of poverty and spinsterhood when the port lies open;
they see me as a bridesmaid to my friends getting married--even as a
godmother to their children--and they shake glo