A vision came to the dreamer's fancy: Widewood's forests filled with thrifty settlers, mines opened, factories humming by the brooksides, the locomotive's whistle piercing the stony ears of the Sleeping Giant; Suez full of iron-ore, coal, and quarried stone, and Fannie a widow, or possibly still unwed, charmed by his successes, touched by his constancy, and realizing at last the true nature of what she had all along felt as only a friendship. "That's it! If I give men good reason to court me, I'll get the woman I court!"--But he did not, for many weeks, give men any irresistible good reason to court him. "Ah me! here's November gone. Talk of minutes slipping through the fingers--the months are as bad as the minutes! Lord! what a difference there is between planning a thing and doing it--or even beginning to do it!" Yet he did begin. There is a season comes, sooner or later, to all of us, when we must love and love must nest. It may fix its choice irrationally on some sweet ineligible Fannie; but having chosen, there it must nest, spite of all. Now, men may begin life not thus moved; but I never knew a man thus moved who still did not begin life. Love being kindled, purpose is generated, and the wheels in us begin to go round. They had gone round, even in John's father; but not only were time, place, and circumstance against the older man, but his love had nested in so narrow a knot-hole that the purposes and activities of his gentle soul died in their prison. "Yes, that's one thing I've got to look out for," mused John one day, riding about the northwestern limits of his lands where a foaming brook kept saying, "Water-power!--good fishing!--good fishing!--water-power!" He dismounted and leaned against his horse by the brook's Widewood side, we may say, although just beyond here lay the odd sixty acres by which Widewood exceeded an even hundred thousand. The stream came down out of a steeply broken region of jagged rocks, where frequent evergreens and russet oaks studded the purple gray maze of trees that like to go naked in winter. But here it shallowed widely and slipped over a long surface of unbroken bed-rock. On its far side a spring gushed from a rocky cleft, leapt down some natural steps, ran a few yards, and slid into the brook. Behind it a red sun shone through the leafless tree-tops. The still air hinted of frost. Suddenly his horse listened. In a moment he heard voices, and by an obscure road up and across the brook two riders came briskly to the water's edge, splashed into the smooth shallow and let their horses drink. They were a man and a maid, and the maid was Barbara Garnet. She was speaking. "We can't get so far out of the way if we can keep this"--she saw John March rise into his saddle, caught a breath, and then cried: