For the first time in her life the New Plymouth gayeties seemed to Val insignificant, even irritating. She rejoiced that Mrs. Gano was so much better that she let Val drive her out almost daily. They were more than ever together, Emmie being absorbed by her church and charity work. One day, driving back into the town, Val was laughing delightfully at her grandmother's caustic remarks upon the "flabby philanthropy" of a certain local society. They passed some soldiers on parade, and a military band playing "Marching Through Georgia." Mrs. Gano's face changed, and, to Val's amazement, she began to weep. Her grandmother! who, since Val was a child, had said at times when other people cried and marvelled that Mrs. Gano sat dry-eyed, "My tears lie very deep, and most of them I shed before you were born!" This sudden gust of sore weeping that shook her to-day stirred the young girl's pulses with a shamed excitement, an obscure gladness. _She_ could feel, too, then, even yet, with passion and unrestraint. But the girl looked away, and presently the shaken voice said: "The poor old South! Did you see the ragged flag, my dear?" "Yes, I saw. We must have made a good fight that day." The "we" on the lips of one born after the war, who never had had her foot in the South, forged a new link. Mrs. Gano had put her hand through the girl's arm and leaned lightly against the strong young shoulder. "One may be proof against a good many things and not be proof against a tattered flag," she said, half apologetically, and she pulled the flapping veil across her face. The old woman and the young one had drawn together in friendship absolute. Not that Mrs. Gano developed an angelic complaisance, or Val a superstitious reverence for the head of the house. They were not merely the elder and the younger of the same race, but two human beings who, side by side for many years, had struggled with themselves and with each other, striking on the flint of character, each knowing at last exactly when the sparks would fly, and each content to feel that the fire and the flint were there. But if Val Gano were not the most irrational of her sex, how was it she could live year in, year out, this narrow life, refusing without misgiving the only apparent ways of escape, waiting for an event that even the eye of faith might well have wearied looking for, while summer passed to autumn and winter waned to spring? The girl believed, or made herself pretend she believed, that the longest conceivable term of her waiting was the term of Mrs. Gano's life. But the truth was even simpler. Val, unfortunately, was one of those persons who do not easily accept whatever Fate chooses to lay at their door. She was rather of those who stand ready to turn away the blind bringer of gifts with the rebuff: "I will have nothing at your hands but the thing I asked."