"I'm weaving the laurel wreath rapidly now to bind your tresses, am I not, dear, dearest Betty?" he had whispered, as he told me good night at the hotel only a few short hours ago. Yes, I was needed in life, even if not down in a brier-patch in the Harpeth Valley, Tennessee, and I must bear my honors and responsibilities with as beautiful a spirit as Sam bore his burden of Belgians. I would have all I could do out in the world, and he would have his life full in the wilderness; but we would be a thousand miles apart. And just here a very strange thing happened. From the weak, cowering, sobbing girl on the bench arose a very determined, red-cheeked, executive young woman who walked over to the nearest ticket-office and demanded of the brisk young clerk what time the different trains left for Tennessee. She found that by going at ten o'clock direct through Cincinnati she could reach Hayesboro two hours ahead of that Belgian emigrant-train that was to go around through Atlanta. Then she went into the dressing-room and got her wad of money out of her stocking, bought a ticket and a Pullman berth, six magazines, some oranges, and a little traveling powder-puff for the end of her red nose, and seated herself in the train before she woke up and found she was I. Then I took a hand and sent Peter a telegram from Philadelphia, though to this day I can't remember what it said; and I settled down to the day and night and part of another day's journey with peace in my heart and the courage to take whatever was coming to me from Sam. When you are doing a thing you know is wholly wrong it is best to make up your mind beforehand just what kind of a right action you are going to claim it to be. It only took me until Pittsburg to have my course with Sam mapped out. I was just going to ask him fairly what right he had to go to farming with a lot of strange and untried Belgians and refuse to take me in, when I had proved myself a good and faithful comrade and worker for him ever since I could stand on my feet. "I just want him to answer me that," I said to myself, and went to bed in the berth at six-thirty and didn't wake up any more until I was at Louisville at eleven. I had been in New York two weeks, and I needed sleep. The interval between that time and three o'clock, which was the hour that I stood before mother and her latest rose-crocheted mat, I spent in strengthening and fortifying my position. "Why, Betty!" said mother, keeping the place open in the magazine she was crocheting from, but kissing me so tenderly that I knew she suspected something had happened to me.