"Before we go any farther I want to make myself clear to you. I still hope to marry Jane. She says she cannot become my wife. You understand why, sir. I only want to tell you that her objections are not objections to me. She is Jane and I love her, sir, because she is." "I hope you can win her over, Graydon. She seems determined, however, and she is unhappy. You can't blame her, either. If there were base or common blood in her, it wouldn't make much difference to her pride. But she's made of other material. She's serious about it and I am sensible enough to get her point of view. She wouldn't want to marry you with the prospect of an eternal shadow that neither of you could get off of your minds. I sometimes wish that I knew who were her parents." "It doesn't matter, so far as I am concerned." "I know, my boy, but she is thinking of the heritage that comes down from her mother to her. You'll never know how it hurt me to find that I had no daughter. It hurts her worse a thousandfold to learn that she has no mother. I trust it may not happen that you will lose her as a wife." "If I really thought I couldn't win her, sir, it would ruin my ambition in life. She loves me, I'm sure." "By the way, Clegg tells me he has offered you the New York office. It is a splendid chance for you. You will take it, of course." "I expect to talk it over with Mr. Clegg when I get to Chicago." "Come up to our apartments. Oh, pardon me, Graydon, I want to ask you if you have sufficient money to carry you through? I know the pay of a private is not great--" "Thank you. I have saved nearly all of it. My father has sent me a draft for five hundred. I don't expect to use it, of course." "Your father?" asked Cable, with a quick, searching look. "And then I did save something in Chicago, strange as it may seem," said Bansemer, with a smile. "I have a few of your five per cents. I trust the road is all right?" The Cables left San Francisco on the following day, accompanied by the Harbins and Graydon Bansemer. There was no mistaking the joy which lay under restraint in the faces and attitude of the Cables. David Cable had grown younger and less grey, it seemed, and his wife was glowing with a new and subdued happiness. Graydon, sitting with the excited Ethel--who was rejoicing in the prospect of New York and the other young man--studied the faces of the three people who sat at the other end of the coach.