"What an exquisite picture you make standing in the doorway there with that ocean of blossoming peach trees stretching up the slope until it kisses the sky line. I wish I were an artist." She looked at him with amazement. "I expected to find you with murder in your heart. I can't understand." Norman took the note from her white fingers. "Because I'm laughing?" "Yes." "Well, isn't the joke on me? I've been preaching, preaching, preaching, about the dignity of all labour. I kicked the first few moments, I confess. The medicine was bitter, but I soon began to find that it was good for the soul. I'm getting acquainted with myself----" Norman paused, read Wolf's order, and looked tenderly into Barbara's eyes. "So you heard of my fall and came to my rescue. It's worth the jolt to be rescued by such a hand." He stooped and kissed the tips of her fingers. "Come with me up the hill yonder among those blossoming trees," he said, leading her toward the orchard. "I want to tell you about a vision I saw in that stable a while ago while I wielded the pitchfork and talked to my old pauper friend, both of us now comrade equals." They walked on in silence through the long, clean rows of fruit trees in full bloom, the air redolent with sweet perfume and quivering with the electric hum of growing life. On the top of the hill they paused and looked toward the sea that stretched away in solemn, infinite grandeur. Below, on the next plateau, rolled in apparently endless acres, the great white carpet of flowering plum trees and further on the tender budding grapes and beyond, lower still, the deep green valley with orange trees flashing their golden fruit. "What a glorious world!" Barbara cried. "Yes," he answered with a sigh, "a world of endless beauty in which after all there's nothing vile but man. And I once thought that in such a world angels only could live." "Must we despair because one man or woman proves false," she asked. "No," he answered cheerily, leading her to a boulder and taking his seat by her side. "I don't despair. I've been seeing visions to-day--visions as old as the beat of the human heart, perhaps, yet always new." He drew the order of Wolf from his pocket and looked at it. "From the moment of my awakening last night from the fool's paradise in which I've been living the past year my mind has been at work on solving the one unsolved problem in this dredge to which he refers. It came to me like a flash while at work this morning." "Your invention will succeed?" she interrupted. "Beyond the shadow of a doubt," he said, with enthusiasm. "I didn't solve it before because I lacked the incentive to apply my mind to it." "And you got the incentive in your defeat?" she asked, in surprise. "Yes. Deprived of my toys, I came back to myself, the source of power." "But your incentive--I don't understand--in such an hour?"