"Then why----" he began; but there was a love-light in the blue-gray eyes to set his heart afire. "You are doing this for me?" he said, trembling on the verge of things unutterable. "Yes. You don't know how it hurts me to see you growing hard and merciless as you climb higher and higher in the path you have marked out for yourself." "The path you have marked out for me," he corrected. "Do you remember our little talk over the embers of the fire in your sitting-room at home? I knew then that I had lost the love I might have won; but the desire to be the kind of leader you were describing was born in me at that moment. I haven't always been true to the ideal. I couldn't be, lacking the right to wear your colors on my heart----" "Don't!" she said. "I haven't been true to my ideals. I--I sold them, David!" She was in his arms when she said it, and the bachelor maid was quite lost in the woman. "I'll never believe that," he said loyally. "But if you did, we'll buy them back--together." * * * * * Penelope was good to them. It was a full half-hour before she professed herself satisfied with the mechanical piano-toy; and when she was through, she helped the woman caretaker to shut the Venetians with clangings that would have warned the most oblivious pair of lovers. And afterward, when they were free of the house, she ran ahead to the waiting auto-car, leaving Kent and Elinor to follow at a snail's pace down the leaf-covered walk to the gate. There was a cedar hedge to mark the sidewalk boundary, and while it still screened them Kent bent quickly to the upturned face of happiness. "One more," he pleaded; and when he had it: "Do you know now, dearest, why I brought you here to-day?" She nodded joyously. "It is the sweetest old place. And, David, dear; we'll bring our ideals--all of them; and it shall be your haven when the storms beat." End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Grafters, by Francis Lynde