"I didn't say that," answered Mary, her face puckered up into a puzzled expression. "I don't want to, and I don't _think_ I would, but, honestly, I don't know what I would do. I'm afraid that if I loved a man as much as you ought to to be his wife that I'd be every bit as foolish as anybody else, and that I'd marry him even if I had to take in back stairs to scrub for a living. But I do hope I'll have more sense, or else he won't be that kind of a man. It isn't that I mind work," she added, "but I'm so tired of doing without and making over, and tugging and pulling to make both ends meet. Do you know what they call me at home? The Watch-dog of the Treasury, and you can guess what I've had to be like to earn such a name. I earned it, too, all right. I fought over every penny, and I'd hate to keep on in the same old rut all the rest of my days. It would be so nice to look forward to a luxurious old age." She laughed when she had said it, but such a tired little sigh came first, and that wistful look again in her honest, straightforward eyes as she glanced up at him, that he was seized with a sudden desire such as no one else had ever inspired before, to pick her up and carry her away from all her troubles; to surround her with all the girlish pleasures and pretty things she loved, and to humor every whim all the rest of her life. But all he said was: "And if you were a man I suppose you would feel the same way about it." "Oh, more so!" she cried. "The more I thought of a girl the surer I'd want to be that she need never face that rainy day unprotected." She stooped to pick a tiny yellow star from a clump of broom growing alongside the track, and they walked on in silence a moment. Then he said, with an amused side-glance at her: "You can't imagine how funny it seems to hear such common-sense, practical 'side talks on matrimony' from an eighteen-year-old girl like you. I feel as if I'd had a scolding from my grandmother, and that I'll have to own up that I did it, but I'm sorry and I'll never do it again." "Did what?" queried Mary in surprise. "Spent everything as fast as I made it. Had money to burn and burnt it. I don't ask any better salary than I've been receiving for several years. Of course, when I go in by myself, that'll be another matter. But I'll have to own up; out of it all, I've saved practically nothing. I haven't spent it in riotous living, and it doesn't seem that I've been particularly extravagant, but it's gone. It just slipped through my fingers." "Oh, well, _you_," began Mary. "That's different." "In what way is it different?" he persisted, when she did not go on. "Well, if a man doesn't mind getting wet himself it's nobody's business if he takes chances. It's the man who expects to--to have some one else to protect--who ought to be ready for the possible storms." "But what makes you think that I'll always go it alone?" insisted Phil. "That I'll never have any one to--protect? That's what you seem to insinuate."