After dinner, when I had had my smoke in the library, we caught hands and wandered like two children over the new house--into the pink and white guest room, and then into Sally's bedroom, where the blue roses sprawled over the chintz-covered furniture and the silk curtains. A glass door gave on a tiny balcony, and throwing a shawl about her head and her bare shoulders, she went with me out into the frosty December night, where a cold bright moon was riding high above the church steeples. With my arm about her, and her head on my breast, we stood in silence gazing over the city, while the sense of her nearness, of her throbbing spirit and body, filled my heart with an exquisite peace. "You and I are the world, Ben." "You are my world, anyway." "It is such a happy world to-night. There is nothing but love in it--no pain, no sorrow, no disappointment. Why doesn't everybody love, I wonder?" "Everybody hasn't you." "I'm so sorry for poor Aunt Mitty,--she never loved,--and for poor Aunt Matoaca, because she didn't love my lover. Oh, you are so strong, Ben; that, I think, is why I first loved you! I see you always in the background of my thoughts pushing that wheel up the hill." "That won you. And to think if I'd known you were there, Sally, I couldn't have done it." "That, too, is why I love you, so there's another reason! It isn't only your strength, Ben, it is, I believe, still more your self-forgetfulness. Then you forgot yourself because you thought of the poor horse; and again, do you remember the day of Aunt Matoaca's death, when you gave her your arm and took her little flag in your hand? You would have marched all the way to the Capitol just like that, and I don't believe you would ever have known that it looked ridiculous or that people were laughing at you." "To tell the truth, Sally, I should never have cared." She clung closer, her perfumed hair on my breast. "And yet they wondered why I loved you," she murmured; "they wondered why!" "Can you guess why I loved you?" I asked. "Was it for your red shoes? Or for that tiny scar like a dimple I've always adored?" "I never told you what made that," she said, after a moment. "I was a very little baby when my father got angry with mamma one day--he had been drinking--and he upset the cradle in which I was asleep." She lifted her face, and I kissed the scar under the white shawl. The next day when I came home to luncheon, she told me that she had been to her old home to see Miss Mitty. "I couldn't stand the thought of her loneliness, so I went into the drawing-room at the hour I knew she would be tending her sweet alyssum and Dicky, the canary. She was there, looking very thin and old, and, Ben, she treated me like a stranger. She wouldn't kiss me, and she didn't ask me a single question--only spoke of the weather and her flower boxes, as if I had called for the first time." "I know, I know," I said, taking her into my arms.