It was literal truth. Mary Vanton understood that instantly. He had, from boyhood, always put her clean above him. He had fought for her, a boyish battle, and been defeated; and after that, while he continued to feel the same way about her, while he continued to love her, the fancy of adolescence maturing into the devotion of the grown man, he had never figured himself in the running. She had stepped outside of the circle of his life, and when she reëntered it, it was as the wife of another man--which was the whole story. “Of course,” he was saying, with his admirable simplicity and acceptance of the facts--so far as he recognized them. “Of course I wish I might have married. It would have been pleasanter. I should either have been much happier or very much unhappier.” Again he looked at her with his smile in which the boy he had been was so clearly visible. When he smiled the little wrinkles at the comers of his eyes, got from much seaward gazing, made him look younger. “I’m worried about you,” he told her, with the directness that was to be expected of him. “Do you think you ought to stay here this winter?” “I think I must,” she answered. “It’s not from any idea of shunning people but because I have got to arrive at some way of living. If Guy were dead I could make an unalterable decision. With Guy alive I have to consider the possibility of his return, the probability of it.” “You feel sure he will return?” “Quite sure. If I thought he were never to return I would reconcile myself to it as best I could, make my plans, and go ahead. Even then I should have to provide for the fact that he might come back. But believing as I do that he is sure to come back, and feeling as I do utterly uncertain how long he will be away, I am very badly perplexed.” “Why do anything?” he asked, wonderingly. “It is not as if you had to earn your bread.” “It is more difficult,” she explained. “When you have to earn your bread, and your children’s bread, you are spared the necessity of any decision. You just set about earning it the best way you can, and puzzle over nothing except how more advantageously to earn it. Or how to earn more. “Those are not my problems and I have everything to be thankful for, no doubt, that they aren’t. And yet--I wonder if it isn’t easier to deal with difficulties under the pressure of necessity? Do you realize that I have no necessity, immediate or remote, pressing upon me to compel me to address myself to my problem, to solve it?” This was not so subtle but that Tom Lupton saw it and said so. “You’d be better off, in a way, if you had to make up your mind to something,” he agreed. “But what I can’t see is what you need to make up your mind to.” Mary Vanton permitted herself a slight gesture of spreading hands.