Step by step Bud felt his way back to the road. And then, walking free and easy, undisturbed now by the noise of his firm feet crunching twig and rock, he returned to his shack on Big Laurel. He went about his farm work whistling. It was something of a relief not to care who heard him. CHAPTER X For centuries philosophers have attempted to disentangle dreams from reality and to fix definite boundaries between the two. They have not found it easy. It is doubtful whether, even if possible, this would prove worth while except for the satisfaction it would bring the philosophers. Probably when the latter are all done with their grave conclusions people will continue to mix the two agreeably to their own lives. If deep-browed academicians have found the task of separation difficult, certainly Roxie Kester cannot be blamed if she did not succeed and so kept right on with her dreaming. Particularly after that wonderful evening when Allston stood by her side like a veritable knight of old. For he had seemed to her then nothing short of magnificent. And yet, unlike most magnificent things in her life--such as story-book heroes and angels and gallant men of whom she read in the papers during the war--not remote. He had been near enough to touch. He _had_ touched her; had held her hands for a moment. How the stars had swam before her then! How close, at that moment, her dreams had seemed to reality. She had been ready to give herself up to them utterly. She had been ready to give herself up to him had he but asked or, not even asking, had taken. A little later, recalling her emotion, she had grown big-eyed, but she did not deny the fact. She had been quite helpless. And she was not ashamed of it. He had fought for her, twice risked his life for her, and she was his if he wished. Not that she had any very definite idea of what that meant. Few of her ideas were definite. They were scarcely more than instincts, warning her here and urging her on there, but always proving themselves sound and sweet and true. Roxie thought of love as she thought of Heaven--a condition of complete happiness necessarily obscure until actually experienced. It was quite detached from marriage, or marriage, at any rate, as she saw it exemplified in the lives about her. Here it meant housekeeping and scarcely anything more than housekeeping. Marriage marked the end of youth; the beginning of old age. It was a serious, more or less matter-of-fact estate into which women entered, not because they wished, but because it was inevitable. It was what Bud Childers had proposed for her. It was what, for the time being at any rate, Allston had saved her from.