"You were crying," he said abruptly. He stood before her, obviously one who had conquered the respect of the world in fair, open battle, and has the courage that is for those only who have tested their strength and know it will not fail them. And the sight of him, the look of him, filled her not with the mere belief, but with the absolute conviction that no malign power in all the world or in the mystery round the world could come past him to her to harass or harm her. The doubts, the sense of desolation that had so agitated her a few minutes before now seemed trivial, weak, unworthy. She lowered her eyes--she had thought he would not observe the slight traces of the tears she had carefully wiped away. She clasped her hands meekly and looked--and felt--like a guilty child. The coldness, the haughtiness were gone from her face. "Yes," she said shyly. "Yes--I--I--" She lifted her eyes--her tears had made them as soft and luminous as the eyes of a child just awake from a long, untroubled sleep. "But--you must not ask me. It's nothing that can be helped. Besides, it seems nothing--now." She forced a faint smile. "If you knew what a comfort it is to cry you'd try it." "I have," he replied. Then after a pause he added: "Once." Something in his tone--she did not venture to look at him again--made her catch her breath. She instantly and instinctively knew when that "once" was. "I don't care to try it again, thank you," he went on. "But it made me able to understand what sort of comfort you were getting. For--YOU don't cry easily." The katydids were clamoring drowsily in the tops of the sycamores. From out of sight beyond the orchard came the monotonous, musical whir of a reaper. A quail whistled his pert, hopeful, careless "Bob White!" from the rail fence edging the wheat field. A bumblebee grumbled among a cluster of swaying clover blossoms which the mower had spared. And the breeze tossed up and rolled over the meadow, over the senses of the young man and the young woman, great billows of that perfume which is the combined essence of all nature's love philters. Pauline sank on the hay, and Scarborough stretched himself on the ground at her feet. "For a long time it's been getting darker and darker for me," she began, in the tone of one who is talking of some past sorrow which casts a retreating shadow over present joy to make it the brighter by contrast. "To-day--this afternoon it seemed as if the light were just about to go out--for good and all. And I came here. I found myself lying on the ground--on the bosom of this old cruel--kind mother of ours. And--" She did not finish--he would know the rest. Besides, what did it matter--now? He said: "If only there were some way in which I could help." "It isn't the people who appear at the crises of one's life, like the hero on the stage, that really help. I'm afraid the crises, the real crises of real life, must always be met alone."