It was not in Peter to do anything by halves. He worked and played like a Trojan and put his back into everything that he took up. He knew by this time, short as it was, that he was wholly and completely in love with the little girl, the first sight of whom had made him catch his breath. With a peculiar kind of grimness he had made up his mind that she was for him if he could win her, and all the previous night he had dreamed of her as his future wife, as the girl who would stand by his side, helpmate and everlasting lover, and for whom he would work well and live well and carry her with him rung by rung to the top of the ladder. He told himself when he awoke that he was a presumptuous ass even to dream that she would care for him. What was there in him for such a girl to care about? All the same, he set his teeth and from that moment laid all his future plans and his hopes and ambitions and all the best of his nature, at her little feet--and knew perfectly well that if Betty could not love him eventually he would walk alone through life. Odd, romantic or foolish as it may seem, when youth falls in and out of love so easily, this was true. Peter had, with a sort of unrealized solemnity, kept his heart free and pure. He was no trifler--he had never philandered. Like the boy who, perhaps unduly imaginative, believes that he will find the place where the rainbow ends, Peter said to himself: "One day I shall find my girl. I want to go to her heart-whole and complete." There was nothing of sentimentality about this. It was simply the outcome of the effect of the mother-influence upon the boy which had become a very concrete thing. Somehow, ever since he was old enough to remember and to think, he had looked upon his mother as his sweetheart, and when she bent over his cot at night and asked God to bless him and left the touch of her soft lips upon his forehead she had impressed upon him the unconscious ambition to make another such woman the centre of his own home. The numerous tender services, the exquisite maternal thoughtfulness of this little mother-woman, had been built up by him into a protection and a lode-star. Betty came--a girl in whom he recognized at once another mother--and she just touched his heart with her finger and walked straight in, fitting into the place which had been kept for her like a diamond into its setting. Poor dear old Peter! No one would have thought, who looked at him sitting there in his big awkwardness and incoherence, that he was a man in love, although a psychologist or even an ordinarily observant girl could very easily have told how Betty felt. "Topping, isn't it?" he said. "Simply wonderful," she replied. "Tired?" "Not a bit." "Pretty good floor, eh?" "Perfectly splendid." "Gee! I shall miss this place." "Why, of course you will." "All the same, I shall be mighty keen to get at things,--and begin." "Yes, of course you will." "How do you know?" "Oh, that's easy." "Is it? How?"