They sat down on a rustic bench curtained with trails of Virginia creeper, red as the blood of the dying summer. Nick kept Timmy on his knee, stroking the glossy back. His hand looked very strong and brown, and Angela longed to snatch it up and lay it against her cheek. How she loved him! How much more even than she had known when she couldn't see his face, his eyes and the light there was in his eyes for her! It had not changed, that wonderful light, though his face was sadder, and, she thought, thinner. "Are you glad to see me again--Nick?" she could not resist asking. He smiled at her wistfully. "Just about as glad as a man would be to see God's sunlight if he'd been in prison, or starving in a mine that had fallen in on him. Only perhaps a little gladder than that." She answered him with a look; and then, as involuntarily she put out her hand to stroke Timmy, their fingers met. He caught hers, held them for an instant, and let them go. "Nick, that day when you saved my life and told me you loved me, did I make you realize that I loved you, too?" she asked. "No. I couldn't think you meant that. I thought you tried to save my feelings by saying you cared; that you were sorry for me, and----" "I was sorry for myself, because, you see, you'd begun to be the one person in the whole world who mattered. Oh, wait; don't speak yet! I had to make you understand that we couldn't be anything to each other, and it was so hard for me, that often I've wondered if, inadvertently, I said things to hurt you more than you need have been hurt. Tell me, truly and frankly, what did you believe I meant by that word I used--'_impossible_'?" He hesitated, then answered slowly: "I felt that I ought to have known, without your telling me, I wasn't the sort of man for you." "You did think that! Oh, Nick, then I'm glad I sent for you--I can't help being glad. If you loved me, and I were free, nothing in the world could come between us, and I should be the happiest creature on earth." "If you were free?" His hand lay heavily on Timmy's back, and the cat resented it by jumping down. But both had forgotten Timmy's existence and their late gratitude to him.