By this time the reader must know Milly well enough to be able to divine for himself what was passing in her mind as she daintily excavated the lobster shell on her plate and listened to the plea of her rejected lover. Probably this was no more able to stir her pulses to a mad rhythm to-day than it had been ten years before. Edgar Duncan was somewhat nearer being her Ideal,--not much. But Milly was ten years older and "had had her throbs," as she once expressed it. She knew their meaning now, their relative value, and she knew other values. The value of a home and a stable position among her fellows, for instance, no matter how small, and so she listens demurely while the man talks hungrily of the Joy of Home and the Beauty of Woman in the Home, "where they belong, not in business." (How Ernestine would give it to him for that, and Hazel, too, Milly thought!) "You are such a woman, Milly!" he exclaims.--"Just a woman!" and in his voice the expression has a tender, reverential sound that falls pleasantly on Milly's ears. But she says nothing: she does not mean to be "soft" this time. Yet in reply to another compliment, she admits, smiling delphically,--"Yes, I _am_ a woman!" The man takes up another verse of his song, for he has planned this attack carefully while the swift wheels were turning off the miles between Washington and Chicago. "You want your little girl to have a home, too, don't you? A real home, _your_ home, where she can get the right sort of start in life?" "Yes," Milly assents quickly. "The proper kind of home means so much more to a girl than to a boy. If I myself had had--" But she stops before this baseness to poor old Horatio. "I want Virgie's life to be different from mine--so utterly different!" A wave of self-pity for her loneliness after all her struggle sweeps over her and casts a cloud on her face. "You can't be a business woman and make that kind of home for your daughter," Duncan persists, pushing forward his point. Milly shakes her head. "I'm afraid a woman can't!" she sighs. (She doesn't feel it necessary to tell him that for almost one hour by the clock she has not been a "business woman," even in the legal sense of the term.) "Oh," she murmurs, as if convinced by his logic, "I'm good for nothing--I can't even be a good mother!" "You are good for everything--for me!" But Milly is not ready yet. In this sort of transaction she has grown to be a more expert trader than she was once. "It must be the right man," she observes impersonally. And the Ranchman takes another start. He paints glowingly the freedom and the beauty of that outdoors life on the Pacific Coast,--the fragrant lemon orchard with its golden harvest of yellow balls, the velvety heavens spangled with stars each night, the blooming roses, etc., etc. But he cannot keep long off the personal note.