But before he began carving down his sand-slopes he had settled that point. He selected his uprights, the longest and strongest in his stock, chopped them to size, and to the end of each pegged stout flat cross-pieces, boring the holes with his auger and driving home the pegs with the back of his axe. These he set up in a line in the middle of the hollow, standing upright on their cross-piece feet. Then, as he carved down his slope, every spadeful of sand buried the cross-pieces deeper, till, when he had finished, they were under two feet of well-trampled sand and he looked upon their rigidity as a personal triumph. That was surely as extraordinary a house as was ever built by a man who knew nothing whatever about building. It took him five full weeks and he enjoyed every minute of it. And so did The Girl, for she sat in the sun, watching all his cheerful activities with envious eyes because she was so unable to share them, discussing points with him as they arose, giving suggestions and advice which he always adopted when they chimed with his own, and approving heartily of all he did. "I wish I could help,"--how many times she said it, and thought it very many more. "It is disgusting to have to sit and watch while you work like a--like a galley-slave." "Galley-slaves don't build houses--not such houses as this anyway. There never was such a house before," he laughed. "Besides, you help more than you know by simply sitting there and approving of it. 'They also serve,' you know, 'who only sit and watch.'" "Who says that?" "One John Milton,--not quite in those words, but the meaning is the same. As a matter of fact, he had, I believe, just gone blind when he said it and was feeling rather out of it. Your arm will soon be all right again. It's doing famously." Truly a wonderful house, not so much because of the quaint way in which its difficulties were surmounted or evaded--which alone might have given an ordinary builder nightmares for the rest of his life, but more especially by reason of the rose-golden thoughts which swept at times like flame through hearts and minds of both watcher and builder as they wrought. If all those glowing thoughts could have transmuted themselves into visible adornment of that rough little home no fairy palace could have vied with it. For ever and again--and mostly ever--in his heart--helping the auger as it bored and the axe as it hammered the pegs well home--was the thought that was radiant enough and mighty enough to transform that desolate bank of sand into a veritable Garden of Eden;--"If no rescue comes, here we shall live--she and I--together,--one in heart and soul and body, and here, maybe, we shall die. But death is a long way off, and Love lives on forever. I would not exchange my Kingdom for all the Kingdoms of the earth."