"You know I have always told you I could not marry you now. I would not burden you with Papa." "Why, yes," he answered mechanically, "we're both young and can wait. You see, really, Pet--you know I am dependent at present on the Gov'nor an'--" "I understand all that," she said quickly--"but"-- "A long engagement will only test our love," he broke in with a show of dignity. "You do not understand," she went on. "Things have got so bad at home that I must earn something." He frowned and tapped his foot impatiently. She sat up closer to him and put her hand on his. He did not move nor even return the pressure. "And so, Harry--if--if to help papa--and Millwood is sold--and I can get a good place in the mill--one off by myself--what they call drawer-in--at good wages,--and, if only for a little while I'd work there--to help out, you know--what would you think?" He sprang up from his seat and dropped her hand. "Good God, Helen Conway, are you crazy?" he said brutally--"why, I'd never speak to you again. Me? A Travis?--and marry a mill girl?" The color went out of her face. She looked in her shame and sorrow toward the sunset, where a cloud, but ten minutes before, had stood all rosy and purple with the flush of the sunbeams behind it. Now the beams were gone, and it hung white and bloodless. In the crisis of our lives such trifles as these flash over us. In the greatness of other things--often turning points in our life--Nature sometimes points it all with a metaphor. For Nature is the one great metaphor. Helen knew that she and the cloud were now one. But she was not a coward, and with her heart nerved and looking him calmly in the face, she talked on and told him of the wretched condition of affairs at Millwood. And as she talked, the setting sun played over her own cheeks, touching them with a halo of such exquisite colors that even the unpoetic soul of Harry Travis was touched by the beauty of it all. And to any one but Harry Travis the proper solution would have been plain. Not that he said it or even meant it--for she was too proud a spirit even to have thought of it--there is much that a man should know instinctively that a woman should never know at all. Harry surprised himself by the patience with which he listened to her. In him, as in his cousin--his pattern--ran a vein of tact when the crisis demanded, through and between the stratum of bold sensuousness and selfishness which made up the basis of his character. And so as he listened, in the meanness and meagerness of his soul, he kept thinking, "I will let her down easy--no need for a scene." It was narrow and little, but it was all that could come into the soul of his narrowness.