l stood in the doorway. It was good
for us older men to see the lad, and at the sight of him I was out
under the stars of Landgore; the sound of gipsy singing, the salt from
the sea, and the odor of blown hawthorn were in the room, and I was
young again with Marian Ingarrach folded in my arms. The brooding look
was gone from his eyes and his face bore a strange illumination. He had
added something to, rather than lost any of the cocksureness of his
manner; but the happiness of him, combined with the love and passion of
his ardent nature, made him a singularly handsome creature as he came
toward us.

"Will you not congratulate me?" he said, looking from one to the other
of us.

"Is she willing to marry you?" his father asked, with exaggerated
amazement.

"If she finds none whom she fancies more, she said she would marry me
within the year----"

"Well, well, there's some hope for you," Sandy went on. "She may meet
in with some one else."

"You've my pity," I laughed, but I took his hand in mine with the
words.

His joy radiated itself to us, and his talk was just as it should be
for his years. He patronized us a bit for being older and out of the
way of it all, spoke of Nancy as though she were the only woman since
Eve, and discussed a betrothal ring as though it were a thing for
empires to rise and fall by.

"She fancies rubies; she cares for gems, you know," he said, as though
the information was new to us instead of having been anciently and
expensively bought.

He must have the best ruby in Scotland, he went on. He wished he could
attend to the matter himself. "But," he stood with his thumbs in the
arms of his waistcoat as he spoke, with a conscious smile--"but no
fellow would be such a bally ass as to dash to London for a ring under
present conditions." There were the four thousand pounds his
grandmother had given him. They might all be spent for this. There was
a fellow named Billy Deuceace, an Oxford man, with taste in such
matters. He would write him concerning it to-night, he said.

"Faith," said Sandy, drolly, "you talk as if married life were all a
ring. Ye'll find it different when your wife has the genius and is
taken up wi' other men."

And Danvers faced the two of us here by a statement which has never
left me from the night he uttered it till the minute of my setting it
down.

"I am far from believing," he said, "that genius is a thing which
rightly belongs to women. 'Tis to me but an issu