"Look here!" he demanded, angrily. "What's the matter? Are you mad?" She threw back her head and laughed at him. "No, I'm not--I'm happy!" "What the devil about?" he snapped. "We're going to wait a bit, that's all, till we're sure of everything!" she cried. "Then," said Roger disgustedly, "you're smarter than your father is. I'm sure of nothing--nothing! I have never been sure in all my days! If I'd waited, you'd never have been born!" "Oh, dearie," she begged him smilingly. "Please don't be so unhappy just now--" "I've a right to be!" said Roger. "I see my house agog with this--in a turmoil--in a turmoil!" * * * * * But again he was mistaken. It was in fact astonishing how the old house quieted down. There came again one of those peaceful times, when his home to Roger's senses seemed to settle deep, grow still, and gather itself together. Day by day he felt more sure that Deborah was succeeding in making her work fit into her swiftly deepening passion for a full happy woman's life. And why shouldn't they live here, Allan and she? The thought of this dispelled the cloud which hung over the years he saw ahead. How smoothly things were working out. The monstrous new buildings around his house seemed to him to draw back as though balked of their prey. On the mantle in Roger's study, for many years a bronze figure there, "The Thinker," huge and naked, forbidding in its crouching pose, the heavy chin on one clenched fist, had brooded down upon him. And in the years that had been so dark, it had been a figure of despair. Often he had looked up from his chair and grimly met its frowning gaze. But Roger seldom looked at it now, and even when it caught his eye it had little effect upon him. It appeared to brood less darkly. For though he did not think it out, there was this feeling in his mind: "There is to be nothing startling in this quiet home of mine, no crashing deep calamity here." Only the steadily deepening love between a grown man and a woman mature, both sensible, strong people with a firm control of their destinies. He felt so sure of this affair. For now, her tension once relaxed with the success which had come to her after so many long hard years, a new Deborah was revealed, more human in her yieldings. She let Allan take her off on the wildest little sprees uptown and out into the country. To Roger she seemed younger, more warm and joyous and more free. He loved to hear her laugh these nights, to catch the glad new tones in her voice. "There is to be no tragedy here." So, certain of this union and wistful for all he felt it would bring, Roger watched its swift approach. And when the news came, he was sure he'd been right. Because it came so quietly. "It's settled, dear, at last it's sure. Allan and I are to be married." She was standing by his chair. Roger reached up and took her hand: "I'm glad. You'll be very happy, my child."