What was it, after all? A year or two of struggle and of attainment, and he would come back flushed with success, to clasp Betty in his arms. In a dozen different ways he pictured to himself the possible manner of that home-coming, obliterating the year or two that lay between. He saw himself a great lawyer from a little reading and a single speech, or a judge upon his bench, famed for his classic learning and his grave decisions. He had only to choose, he felt, and he might be anything--had they not told him so at college? did not even his grandfather admit it? He had only to choose--and, oh, he would choose well--he would choose to be a man, and to come riding back with his honours thick upon him. Looking ahead, he saw himself a few years hence, as he rode leisurely homeward up the turnpike, while the stray countrymen he met took off their harvest hats, and stared wonderingly long after he was gone. He saw the Governor hastening to the road to shake his hand, he saw his grandfather bowed with the sense of his injustice, tremulous with the flutter of his pride; and, best of all, he saw Betty--Betty, with the rays of light beneath her lashes, coming straight across the drive into his arms. And then all else faded slowly from him to give place to Betty, and he saw her growing, changing, brightening, as he had seen her from her childhood up. The small white figure in the moonlight, the merry little playmate, hanging on his footsteps, eager to run his errands, the slender girl, with the red braids and the proud shy eyes, and the woman who knelt upon the hearth in Aunt Ailsey's cabin, smiling up at him as she dried her hair--all gathered round him now illuminated against the darkness of the night. Betty, Betty,--he whispered her name softly beneath his breath, he spoke it aloud in the silence of the turnpike, he even cried it out against the mountains, and waited for the echo--Betty, Betty. There was not only sweetness in the thought of her, there was strength also. The hand that had held him back when he would have gone out blindly in his passion was the hand of a woman, not of a girl--of a woman who could face life smiling because she felt deep in herself the power to conquer it. Two days ago she had been but the girl he loved, to-night, with her kisses on his lips, she had become for him at once a shield and a religion. He looked outward and saw her influence a light upon his pathway; he turned his gaze within and found her a part of the sacred forces of his life--of his wistful childhood, his boyish purity, and the memory of his mother.