amn fool, I'm here now!"

"Will you stay here, if you marry her, Jeff?"

"So you've no objection to make, if I've got a few dollars? That squares
everything all right, does it? Not a yeep of protest from you now? See
here, you everlasting fool! I'm just the same man I was fifteen minutes
ago when you thought I didn't have any money. If I'm fit for her now, I
was then. If I wasn't good enough then, I'm not good enough now."

"But I wasn't thinking of her--I was thinking of--how it would look."

"Look? Who cares how it looks? Just a silly prejudice! 'They say--what
say they--let them say!' Johnny, maybe I was just stringin' you. If I
was lying about the money--how about it then? Changed your mind again?"

"You wasn't lyin', was you?"

"Shan't tell you! It doesn't really make any difference, anyhow."

CHAPTER XVIII

AT THE RAINBOW'S END

"Helen's lips are drifting dust;
Ilion is consumed with rust;
All the galleons of Greece
Drink the ocean's dreamless peace;
Lost was Solomon's purple show
Restless centuries ago;
Stately empires wax and wane--
Babylon, Barbary and Spain--
Only one thing, undefaced,
Lasts, though all the worlds lie waste
And the heavens are overturned,
--Dear, how long ago we learned!"

--FREDERICK LAWRENCE KNOWLES.

Starlit and moonlight leagues, the slow, fresh dawn; in the cool of the
morning, Bransford came to the crest of the ground-swell known as
Frenchman's Ridge, and saw low-lying Arcadia dim against the north, a
toy town huddling close to the shelter of Rainbow Range; he splashed
through the shallow waters of Alamo, failing to a trickle before it sank
in the desert sands; and so came at last to the moat of Arcadia. With
what joyous and eager-choking heart-beat you may well guess: not the
needlessness of those swift pulses or of that joy. For Ellinor was not
there. With Mrs. Hoffman, she had gone to visit the Sutherlands at
Rainbow's End. And Jeff could not go on. Arcadia rose to greet him in
impromptu Roman holiday.

Poor Bransford has never known clearly what chanced on that awful day.
There is a jumbled, whirling memory of endless kaleidoscopic troops of
joyful Arcadians: Billy White, Monte, Jimmy, Clarke, the grim-smiling
sheriff, the judge. It was dimly borne upon him by one or both of the
two last, that there were yet certain formalities to be observed in the
matter of his escape fro