"Let's take a walk," he said abruptly. "Except when you asked me to marry you--you never proposed a more delightful thing," she responded with gayer laugh than he had heard for a long time. "Suppose we walk down through the park and take a look at the lake," he suggested. "I call that a genuine inspiration!"--losing no time in getting Karl's things and her own. Nothing could have pleased her more than this. It seemed beginning the spring right. "I can fancy we are in Europe," he said, after they had gone a little way, and she laughed understandingly;--this seemed closer to the spirit of the old days than they had come for a long time. Her guiding hand was on his arm, but more as if she liked to have it there, than as though necessary. "Your little finger could pilot me through Hades" he said, lovingly, gratefully, as a light touch told him of a step to go down, and again she laughed; it was very easy to laugh this morning. The winter, full of hard things for them both, had gone now, and spring, as is spring's way, held promise. In the laboratory they no longer treated Ernestine with mere courteous interest. That day in December when she went down to Dr. Parkman's operation had marked a change. Since then there had been a light ahead, a light which shed its rays down the path she must go. What did it matter if she were a little stupid about this or that, if Mr. Beason was unconsciously rude or Mr. Willard consciously polite? For she _knew_ now--and did anything matter save the final things? With her own feeling of its not mattering their attitude had seemed to change; she became more as one with them--she was quick to get that difference. "You're arriving on the high speed," Dr. Parkman had assured her when he visited the laboratory a few days before. So she knew why she was happy, for added to all that was it not a glorious and propitious thing that Karl felt like taking a walk? Did it not argue a new interest in life--a new determination not to be shut off from it? And Karl--why did he too seem to feel that the spring held new and better things? Was it just the call of spring, or did Karl sense the good things ahead? Could it be that her soul, unable to contain itself longer, had whispered to his that new days were coming? "Why, even a fellow on his way to the penitentiary for life would have to get some enjoyment out of this morning," he said, after they had stood still for a minute to listen to the song of a bird, and had caught the sweetness of a flowering tree. "And oh, Karl," she laughed, joyously, "you're _not_ on your way to the penitentiary for life." "No," he said, and he seemed to be speaking to something within himself rather than to her,--"I'm _not_!"