"I know it," she rejoined. "And I am big enough to be glad. Neither was it for my sake that you instructed your lawyers to return good for evil by redeeming the Farleys' stock just before they left for Colorado, or that you made restitution to the families of the men at Gordonia for their losses during the strike." But again he was shaking his head dubiously. "I'm not so sure about that. It's in any man to play high when the good opinion of the one woman is the stake. I'm a _poseur_, like all the others." She smiled down on him and the slate-blue eyes were reading him to the latest-indited heart-line. "You are posing now," she asseverated. "Don't I know?--don't I always and always know?" And, after a reflective moment: "It is a great comfort to be able to love the poses, and a still greater to be permitted to discern the true man under them." "I am glad to believe that you don't see quite to the bottom of that well, Ardea, girl," he said with sudden gravity. "I get only occasional glimpses, myself, and they make me seasick. I don't believe any man alive could endure it to look long into the inner abysses of himself." "'The heart knoweth his own bitterness,'" she quoted, speaking softly; and then--O rarest of women!--she did not enlarge on it. Instead-- Silence while she was gathering the sweet-smelling tangle in her lap into some more portable arrangement. And afterward, when they were drifting slowly homeward in the lengthening shadows, a small asking. "Mr. Morelock is coming out to-morrow to hold service in St. John's, and I shall go to play for him. Will you go with me, Tom?" He smiled out of the gold and sapphire depths of a lover's reverie. "One week from the day after the day after to-morrow--and it will be the longest week-and-two-days of my life, dearest--your grandfather will take you to church, and I shall bring you away. Won't that be enough?" She took him quite seriously. "I shall never be a Felicita Young-Dickson, and drag you," she promised. "But, O Tom! I wish--" "I know," he said gently. "You are thinking of the days to come; when the paths may diverge--yours and mine--ever so little; when there may be children to choose between their mother's faith and their father's indifference. But I am not indifferent. So far from it, I am only anxious now to prove what I was once so bent on disproving." "You yourself are the strongest proof," she interposed. "You will see it, some day." "Shall I? I hope so; and that is an honest hope. And really and truly, I think I have come up a bit--out of the wilderness, you know. I am willing to admit that this is the best of all possible worlds; and I want to do my part in making it a little better because I have lived in it. Also, I'd like to believe in something bigger and better than protoplasm." Her smile was of the kind which stands half-way in the path to tears, but she spoke bravely to the doubt in his reply.