"No, listen to me, listen to me," she said gravely. "As long as I have you and you love me, Ben, nothing can break my spirit, because the thing that makes life of value to me will still be mine. If you ever ceased to love me, I might get desperate, and do something wild and foolish--even run off with another man, I believe--I don't know, but I am my father's daughter, as well as my mother's. Until that time comes, I can bear anything, and bear it with courage--with gaiety even. I can imagine myself without everything else, but not without you. I love my child--you know I love my child--but even my child isn't you. If I had to choose to-night between my baby and you, I'd give him up,--and cling the closer to you. You are myself, and if I had to choose between everything else I've ever known in my life and you, I'd let everything else go and follow you anywhere--anywhere. There is nothing that you can endure that I cannot share with you. I can bear poverty, I could even have borne shame. If we had to go to some strange country far away from all I have ever known, I could go and go cheerfully. I can work beside you, I can work for you--oh, my dear, my dearest, I am your wife, do you still doubt me?" I had fallen on my knees before her, with her open palms pressed to my forehead, in which my very brain seemed throbbing. As I looked up at her, she stooped and gathered me to her bosom. "Do you know me now?" she asked in a whisper. Then her voice broke, and the next instant she would have sunk down beside me, if I had not sprung to my feet and lifted her in my arms. While I held her thus, pressed close against me, something of her radiant strength entered into me, and I was aware of a power in myself that was neither hers nor mine, but the welding of the finer qualities in both our natures. CHAPTER XXVI THE RED FLAG AT THE GATE Sally was not beside me when I awoke in the morning, nor was she sipping her coffee by the window, as I had sometimes found her doing when I slept late. Going downstairs an hour afterwards, I discovered her, for the first time since our marriage, awaiting me in the dining-room. In her dainty breakfast jacket of blue silk, with a bit of lace and ribbon framing her wreath of plaits, she appeared to my tired eyes as the embodied freshness and buoyancy of the morning. Would her sparkling gaiety endure, I wondered, through the monotonous days ahead, when poverty became, not a child's play, not a game tricked out by the imagination, but the sordid actuality of hard work and hourly self-denial? "I am practising early rising, Ben," she said, "and it's astonishing what an appetite it gives one. I've made the coffee myself, and Aunt Mehitable has just taught me how to make yeast. One can never tell what may come useful, you know, and if we go to live somewhere in a jungle, which I'm quite prepared to do, you'd be glad to know that I could make yeast, wouldn't you?"