"Now I can go back like a man and fight it through to the end," he exulted soberly. "Jibbey will take me; I know he is wearing himself out trying to make me believe that he can wait, and that Verda understands, though he won't admit it. And when it is all over, when they have done their worst to me----" With a quick little twist she broke away from the encircling arm. "John, dear," she said, and her voice was trembling between a laugh and a sob, "I'm the wickedest, _wickedest_ woman that ever lived and breathed--and the happiest! I knew what you would do, but I couldn't resist the temptation to make you say it. Listen: this morning Colonel-daddy got a night-letter from Billy Starbuck. You have been wondering why Billy never came out here to see you--it was because he and Mr. Stillings have been in Lawrenceville, trying to clear you. They are there now, and the wire says that Watrous Dunham has been arrested and that he has broken down and confessed. You are a free man, John; you----" The grass-cropping pony had widened its circle by a full yard, and the westward-pointing shadows of the firs were growing shorter and more clearly defined as the August sun swung higher over the summits of the eastern Timanyonis. For the two on the house bench, time, having all its interspaces filled with beatific silences, had no measure that was worth recording. In one of the more coherent intervals it was the man who said: "Some things in this world are very wonderful, Corona. We call them happenings, and try to account for them as we may by the laws of chance. Was it chance that threw us together at your cousin's house in Guthrieville a year ago last June?" She laughed happily. "I suppose it was--though I'd like to be romantic enough to believe that it wasn't." "Debritt would say that it was the Absolute Ego," he said, half musingly. "And who is Mr. Debritt?" "He is the man I dined with on my last evening in Lawrenceville. He had been joking me about my various little smugnesses--good job, good clothes, easy life, and all that, and he wound up by warning me to watch out for the Absolute Ego." "What is the Absolute Ego?" she asked dutifully. John Montague Smith, with his curling yellow beard three weeks untrimmed, with his clothes dressing the part of a neglected camper, and with a steel-jacketed bullet trying to encyst itself under his right shoulder-blade, grinned exultantly. "Debritt didn't know, himself; but I know now: it's the primitive man-soul; the 'I' that is able to refuse to be bound down and tied by environment or habit or petty conventions, or any of the things we misname 'limitations.' It's asleep in most of us; it was asleep in me. You made it sit up and rub its eyes for a minute or two that evening in Guthrieville, but it dozed off again, and there had to be an earthquake at the last to shake it alive. Do you know the first thing it did when it took hold and began to drive?" "No."