"Yes, it must be good-bye--dear Chris!" she said, with a little emotion. "Although I hope we will see each other often, if ever Wolf and I come back. Engineers live in Canada and Panama and India and Alaska, you know, and we never will know we are coming until we get here! And I'm not going to try to thank you, Chris, for what you did for an ignorant, silly, strange little girl; you've been a big brother to me all these last years! And something more, of course," Norma added, bravely, "and I won't say--I can't say--that if it hadn't been for Wolf, and all the changes this year--changes in me, too--I wouldn't have loved you all my life. But there's no place that you could take me, as Wolf Sheridan's divorced wife, that would seem worth while to me, when I got there--not if it was in the peerage!" "There's just one thing that I want to say, too, Norma," Chris said, suddenly, when she had finished. "I'm not good enough for you; I know it. I see myself as I am, sometimes, I suppose. I think you're going to be happy--and God knows I hope so; perhaps it _is_ a realer life, your husband's: and perhaps a man who works for his wife with his hands and his head has got something on us other fellows after all! I've often wished----But that doesn't matter now. But I want you to know I'll always remember you as the finest woman I ever knew--just the best there is! And if ever I've hurt you, forgive me, won't you, Norma?--and--and let me kiss you good-bye!" She raised her face to his confidently, and her eyes were misty when she went upstairs, because she had seen that his were wet. But there was no more unhappiness; indeed an overwhelming sense that everything was right--that every life had shifted back into normal and manageable and infinitely better lines, went with her as she walked slowly out into the sunshine, and wandered in the general direction of Aunt Kate's. As she left the old Melrose home, the big limousine was standing at the door, and presently Annie and Leslie would sweep out in their flowing veils and crapes, and whirl off to the Von Behrens mansion. But Norma Sheridan was content to walk to the omnibus, and to take the jolting front seat, and to look down in all brotherly love and companionship at the moving and shifting crowds that were glorying in the warm spring weather. To be busy--to be needed--to be loved--she said to herself. That was the sweet of life, and it could not be taken from the policeman at the crossing or the humblest little shop-girl who scampered under his big arm, or bought by the bored women in limousines who, furred and flowered and feathered, were moving from the matinée to the tea table. Caroline Craigie, Aunt Annie, Leslie; she had seen the material advantages of life fail them all. CHAPTER XXXV