Her hand hung over the side of her chair nearest to him. He looked at it eagerly, but made no movement to take it. During all their long comradeship he had never so much as ventured to hold her fingers. This was David Courtlaw, whose ways, too, had never been very different from the ways of other men as regards her sex. "You see, it comes after all," she continued, "from certain original convictions which have become my religion. Rather a magniloquent term, perhaps, but what else am I to say? One of these is that the most absolutely selfish thing in the world is to give way to depression, to think of one's troubles at all except of how to overcome them. I spend many delightful hours thinking of the pleasant and beautiful things of life. I decline to waste a single second even in considering the ugly ones. Do you know that this becomes a habit?" "If you would only teach us all," he murmured, "how to acquire it." "I suppose people would say that it is a matter of temperament," she continued. "With me I believe that it is more. It has become a part of the order of my life. Whatever may happen to-morrow I shall be none the better for anticipating its miseries to-day." "I wonder," he said, a trifle irrelevantly, "what the future has in store for you." She shrugged her shoulders. "Is that not rather a profitless speculation, my friend?" He seemed deaf to her interruption. His grey eyes burned under his shaggy eyebrows. He leaned towards her as though anxious to see more of her face than that faint delicate profile gleaming like marble in the uncertain light. "You were born for great things," he said huskily. "For great passions, for great accomplishments. Will you find your destiny, I wonder, or will you go through life like so many others--a wanderer, knocking ever at empty doors, homeless to the last? Oh, if one could but find the way to your heart." She laughed gaily. "Dear friend," she said, "remember that you are speaking to one who has failed in the only serious object which she has ever sought to accomplish. My destiny, I am afraid, is going to lead me into the ruts." He shook his head. "You were never born," he declared, "to follow the well worn roads. I wonder," he added, after a moment's pause, "whether you ever realize how young you are." "Young? I am twenty-four." "Yet you are very young. Anna, why will you persist in this single-handed combat with life?" "Don't!" she cried. "But I must, I will," he answered fiercely. "Oh, I know you would stop me if you could. This time you cannot. You are the woman I love, Anna. Let me make your future for you. Don't be afraid that I shall stunt it. I will give you a broad free life. You shall have room to develop, you shall live as you will, where you will, only give me the right to protect you, to free you from all these petty material cares." She laid her hand softly upon his.