"You mayn't know it, Sheba," he had said once to her, "but you're a pretty numerous young person. You're a man's wife and family, and mother and sisters, and at least half a dozen boys and girls." All his thoughts had concentrated themselves upon her--all his psychological problems had held her as their centre, all his ethical reasonings had applied themselves to her. "She's got to be happy," he said to himself, "and she's got to be strong enough to stand up under unhappiness, if--if I should be taken away from her. When the great thing that's--that's the meaning of it all--and the reason of it--comes into her life, it ought to come as naturally as summer does. If her poor child of a mother--Good Lord! Good Lord!" And here he sat in the moonlight, and Delia Vanuxem's son was looking at her with ardent, awakened young eyes. How she listened as Rupert told his story, and how sweetly she was moved by the pathos of it. Once or twice she made an involuntary movement forward, as if she was drawn towards him, and uttered a lovely low exclamation which was a little like the broken coo of a dove. Rupert did not know that there was pathos in his relation. He made only a simple picture of things, but as he went on Tom saw all the effect of the hot little town left ruined and apathetic after the struggle of war, the desolateness of the big house empty but for its three rooms, its bare floors echoing to the sound of the lonely pair of feet, the garden grown into a neglected jungle, the slatternly negro girl in the kitchen singing wild camp-meeting hymns as she went about her careless work. "It sounds so lonely," Sheba said, with tender mournfulness. "That was what it was--lonely," Rupert answered. "It's been a different place since Matt came, but it has always been lonely. Uncle Tom," putting his hand on the big knee near him, as impulsively as a child, "I love that old Matt--I love him!" "Ah, so do I!" burst forth Sheba. "Don't you, Uncle Tom?" And she put her hand on the other knee. Rupert looked down at the hand. It was so fair and soft and full of the expression of sympathy--such an adorably womanly little hand, that one's first impulse was to lay one's own upon it. He made a movement and then remembered, and looked up, and their eyes met and rested on each other gently. When the subject of the claim was broached, Sheba thought it like a fairy tale. She listened almost with bated breath. As Rupert had not realised that he was pathetic in the relation of the first part of his story, so he did not know that he was picturesque in this. But his material had strong colour. The old man on the brink of splendid fortune, the strange, unforeseen national disaster sweeping all before it and leaving only poverty and ruin, the untouched wealth of the mines lying beneath the earth on which battles had been fought--all the possibilities the future might hold for one penniless boy--these things were full of suggestion and excitement.