"If you could know," I went mournfully on, "the joy I felt when I first looked on the Valley--_our_ Valley--again at Fort Stanwix; if you could only realize how I counted the hours and minutes which separated me from this home, from you and her, and how I cried out at their slowness; if you could guess how my heart beat when I walked up the path out there that evening, and opened that door, and looked to see you two welcome me--ah, then you could feel the bitterness I have felt since! I came home burning with eagerness, homesickness, to be in my old place again near you and her--and the place was filled by another! If I have seemed rude and sullen, _that_ is the reason. If I had set less store upon your love, and upon her--her--liking for me, then doubtless I should have borne the displacement with better grace. But it put me on the rack. Believe me, if I have behaved to your displeasure, and hers, it has been from very excess of tenderness trampled underfoot." At least the misunderstanding had been cleared up, and for a time, at all events, the heart of my life-long friend had warmed again to me as of old. He put his hand paternally upon my knee, and patted it softly. "My poor boy," he said, with a sympathetic half-smile, and in his old-time gravely gentle voice: "even in your tribulation you must be Dutch! Why not have said this to me--or what then occurred to you of it--at the outset, the first day after you came? Why, then it could all have been put right in a twinkling. But no! in your secretive Dutch fashion you must needs go aloof, and worry your heart sore by all sorts of suspicions and jealousies and fears that you have been supplanted--until, see for yourself what a melancholy pass you have brought us all to! Suppose by chance, while these sullen devils were driving you to despair, you had done injury to Philip--perhaps even killed him! Think what your feelings, and ours, would be now. And all might have been cleared up, set right, by a word at the beginning." I looked hard into the fire, and clinched my teeth. "Would a word have given me Daisy?" I asked from between them. He withdrew his hand from my knee, and pushed one of the logs petulantly with his foot. "What do you mean?" he demanded. "I mean that for five years I have desired--for the past six months have, waking or sleeping, thought of nothing else but this desire of my heart--to have Daisy for my wife."