He shook his head slowly. "I wish that appealed to me, as it ought. But it doesn't. Where is the proof?" She rose from the piano seat and went to stand before him. "Can you ask that, soberly and in earnest, after the wonderful experience you have had?" "I have asked it," he insisted stubbornly. "You mustn't take anything for granted. Just at that moment I couldn't kill a man; but that is all the difference. I've done what I meant to do, or most of it." She was holding him steadily with her eyes. "Are you glad, or sorry, Tom?" He frowned up at her. "I don't know. Now that it's all over, the taste of it is like sawdust in the mouth; I'll admit that much. I'm free; 'free among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave,' as David put it when he had sounded all the depths. Is that being sorry?" "No--I don't know," she confessed. He was smiling now. "You think I ought to go back to first principles: get down on my knees and agonize over it? Sometimes I wish I could be a boy long enough to do just that thing, Ardea. But I can't. The mill won't grind with the water that has passed." "But the stream isn't dry," she asserted, taking up his figure. "What will you do now? That is the question: the only one that is ever worth asking." He was frowning thoughtfully again, and the words came as an unconscious voicing of vague under-depths. "They took to the woods, the waste places, the deserts--those men of old who didn't understand. Some of them went blind and crazy and died there; and some of them had their eyes opened and came back to make the world a little better for their having lived in it. I'm minded to try it." She caught her breath in a little gasp which she was careful not to let him see. "You are going away?" she asked. "Yes; out to the 'beyond' in northern Arizona. There is a new iron field out there to be prospected, and Mr. Clarkson wants me to go and report on it. And that brings us back to business. May I talk business--cold money business--to you for a minute or two?" "If you like," she permitted. "Only I think the other kind of talk is more profitable." "Wait till you hear what I have to say in dollars and cents. That ought to interest you." "Why should it--particularly?" "Because you are going to marry a poor man, and--" She turned away from him quickly and stood facing the window. But he went on with what he had to say. "That's all right; I can say it to your back, just as well. You know, I suppose, that your--that the Farleys have lost out completely?" "Yes,"--to the window-pane. "Well, a curious thing has come to pass--quite a miraculous thing, in fact. Chiawassee will pay the better part of its debts and--and redeem its stock; or some of it, at least." He rose and stood beside her. "Isn't it a thousand pities that Colonel Duxbury couldn't have held on to his shares just a little longer?"