“Do you suppose that I can wish to lead the idle sort of life I do?” he asked quickly, looking up at her to compel a direct answer. “It is only because I have not a motive strong enough to make me break away, and desire of action is dead; but is that doing as one wishes?” “Oh, I thought you loved it here at Gilead, and could not be happy out of sight of the river—I—at least that is—what I made of what Dr. Russell said,” stammered the girl, astonished at his vehemence in contrast to his usual deliberation. “I do not know what he has said,—nothing unkind, that I warrant; but he does not know—no one does. Listen, Brooke, for I am minded to do what I have never done before—put my burden on some one else by sharing it, and tell you the real reason why I am as I am, which has never before passed my lips in words. No, you must be patient and listen,” he said, for Brooke had made a sudden movement as if to rise. Stead did not realize that he was perhaps spoiling the girl’s holiday; self-centred he was, at base an egotist, though an unconscious one; and to the fact that he regarded everything at the point where it touched himself could be laid the pith of all his unhappiness. “Why do I tell you? I do not know, except that in all these years since, you are the first woman I have met whom I think would understand and who is also young enough to have mercy, and it is a matter for woman’s judgment. Yesterday a letter came to me from an old friend in my profession, asking me to overlook a bit of bridge work for him for a month or so in early summer, while he takes some needed rest. At the end he tells me of his plans for work, urges me to join him, and gives me what he words as ‘a last call back to life.’ All this has stirred up the sources of a stream I thought long dry; instead of putting it away, as I once did, as something done and gone, it tempts me, and I am strangely all at sea. I feel as if I only need some one in whose sincerity I could believe to say, ‘Go back to work,’ and I should go.” “And leave the River Kingdom?” asked Brooke, looking up in alarm, her first thought, it must be said, being of the Cub’s schooling. “We should miss you so.” Stead’s eye brightened, and taking her hand that was not busy with the apple and rested on the stump, he held it between his own. He himself did not analyze his motive, simply it gave him comfort and secured her attention. Then he said earnestly, solemnly it seemed to the girl, from whose eyes the merry banter of a few minutes before had passed, “Listen, Brooke, brave woman, who is fighting out her own problems to the shame of others such as I. “When I was turning thirty and engineering a railway through a mountain region of the south, I met and loved a woman as heartily as a man may, but the passion seemed one-sided. She had given me a final answer, and I was preparing to go away, as gossips whispered there was ‘some one else,’ when the next day she recalled the no and made it yes.