Valiant heaved a long sigh of satisfaction as he stood in the sunlight gazing at the results of his labors. He was not now the flippant boulevardier to whom money was the sine qua non of existence. He had learned a sovereign lesson—one gained not through the push and fight of crowds, but in the simple peace of a countryside, unvexed by the clamor of gold and the complex problems of a competitive existence—that he had inherited a need of activity, of achievement: that he had been born to do. He had worked hard, with hand and foot, with hoe and mattock—strenuous perspiring effort that made his blood course fast and brought muscle-weariness over which nature had nightly poured her soothing medicaments of peace and sleep. His tanned face was as clear as a fine brown porcelain, [Pg 247]his eye bright, and his muscles rippled up under his skin with elastic power. “Chum,” he said, to the dog rolling on his back in the grass, “what do you think of it all, anyway?” He reached down, seized a hind leg and whirling him around like a teetotum, sent him flying into the bushes, whence Chum launched again upon him, like a catapult. He caught the white shoulders and held him vise-like. “Just about right, eh? But wait till we get those ramblers! “And to think,” he continued, whimsically releasing him, “that I might have gone on, one of the little-neck-clam crowd I’ve always trained with, at the same old pace, till the Vermouth-cocktail-Palm-Beach career got a double Nelson on me and the umpire counted me out. And I’d have ended by lazying along through my forties with a bay-window and a bunch of boudoir keys! Now I can kiss my hand to it all. At this moment I wouldn’t swap this old house and land, and the sunshine and that ‘gyarden’ and Unc’ Jefferson and Aunt Daph and the chickens and the birds and all the rest of it, for a mile of Millionaires’ Row.” He drew from his jacket pocket a somewhat worn note and unfolded the dainty paper with its characteristic twirly handwriting. “The scarlet geraniums rimming the porch,” he muttered, “the coral honeysuckle on the old dead tulip-tree, and the [Pg 248]fuchsias and verbenas by the straight walk. How right she is! They’re all growing, too. I haven’t lost a single slip.” He caught himself up short, strode to the nearest porch-pillar and rapped on it smartly with his knuckles. “I must knock on wood,” he said, “or I’ll lose my luck.” He laughed a little. “I’m certainly catching Uncle Jefferson’s superstitions. Perhaps that’s in the soil, too!” He went into the house and to the library. The breeze through the wide-flung bow-window was fluttering the papers on the desk and the map on the wall was flapping sidewise. He went to straighten it, and then saw what he had not noticed before—that it covered something that had been let into the plaster. He swung it aside and made an exclamation.