"You would be rich," said Sheba. "So would Uncle Tom," Rupert answered, smiling; "and you, too." Tom had been listening with a reflective look on his face. He tilted his chair back and ran his hand through his hair. "At all events, we couldn't _lose_ money if we didn't gain any," he said. "That's where we're safe. When a man's got to the place where he hasn't anything to lose, he can afford to take chances. Perhaps it's worth thinking over. Let's go to bed, children. It's midnight." When they said good-night to each other, the two young hands clung together kindly and Sheba looked up with sympathetic eyes. "Would you like to be very rich?" she asked. "To-night I am rich," he answered. "That is because you and Uncle Tom have made me feel as if I belonged to someone. It is so long since I have seemed to belong to anyone." "But now you belong to us," said Sheba. He stood silently looking down at her a moment. "Your eyes look just as they did when you were a little child," he said. He lifted her hand and pressed his warm young lips to it. CHAPTER XXII He awoke the next morning with a glow in his heart which should not be new to youth, but was new to him. He remembered feeling something rather like it years before when he had been a little boy and had wakened on the morning of his birthday and found his mother kissing him and his bed strewn with gifts. He went downstairs and, strolling on to the porch, saw Sheba in the garden. As he went to join her, he found himself in the midst of familiar paths and growths. "Why," he exclaimed, stopping before her, "it is the old garden!" "Yes," Sheba answered; "Uncle Tom made it like this because he loved the other one. You and I have played in the same garden. Good-morning," laughing. "Good-morning," he said. "It is a good-morning. I--somehow I have been thinking that when I woke I felt as I used to do when I was a child and woke on my birthday." That morning she showed him her domain. To the imaginative boy she led with her, she seemed like a strange young princess, to whom all the land belonged. She loved it so and knew so well all it yielded. She showed him the cool woods where she always found the first spring flowers, the chestnut and walnut trees where she and Tom gathered their winter supply of nuts, the places where the wild grapes grew thickest, and those where the ground was purple-carpeted with violets. They wandered on together until they reached a hollow in the road, on one side of which a pine wood sloped up a hillside, looking dark and cool. "I come here very often," she said, quite simply. "My mother is here." Then he saw that a little distance above the road a deserted log cabin stood, and not far from it two or three pine trees had been cut down so that the sun could shine on a mound over and about which flowers grew. It was like a little garden in the midst of the silent wildness.