Once he had seen in a private collection a very vivid and terrible painting in which the headless body of a young girl, surrounded by flaming torches, was borne through the streets of Paris to inflame the mob, and it came to him now that he would like to take Gloriana-Virginia’s body in that fashion and carry it through the length and breadth of the land, until he made all the--what had Glen Darrow called him?--idle-born, overfed, underworked people feel what he was feeling now! And Glen Darrow should go with him, and rouse them with him, and--and _be_ with him! He had forgotten in the acute emotion of the last hour, the thing which had become quite clear to him that evening; he had been groping toward it, of course, ever since that first day, when she had faced him so gamely and gallantly and said--“I wrote it!”--but it had not assumed the final certainty until he had seen her going away with Luke Manders. He knew now, without any shadow of doubt, what he wanted, and whatever he had wanted, for more than twenty-two years, he had gotten. It would not be easy, perhaps, but he didn’t want it to be easy, for he was tired, tired to the marrow of his bones of easy things.... He came out of his meditation with a start to find her standing on the other side of the bed. “Thank you,” she said very gently. “Thank you for staying. You can go now.” It was not a dismissal but a release. There were tears in her eyes but she was not crying. “M’liss’ will come, and I am here, now.” She lifted the sheet for an instant, and her firm chin which was like her truculent father’s quivered, and for a long moment Gloriana-Virginia Tolliver’s two friends stood on either side of her, looking down at her, wordlessly. Then Glen covered her again. “If only I hadn’t left her!” “You mustn’t--it was--very quick,” he said clumsily. “I--I’m certain she never knew. She was wishing--on your Wishing Carpet--” he saw a tiny spasm of grief contort the girl’s face for an instant--“and then it--it was all over.” The fluent young man could not, apparently, find anything more fitting than the old rubber-stamp phrase. Perhaps, for the first time in his nimble-tongued experience, he was finding words inadequate for his needs, for he came slowly round the foot of the bed and stood very close to her, without speaking at all, in a gentle, companionable silence. Gloriana-Virginia, who had worried so about their feud, might well be satisfied, there beneath her sheet; at last they were, as she had “honed” to have them--“sweet and mannerly.” It would have delighted her to see him lean nearer, and lift one of Glen’s hands, and look at it gravely before he turned it over and placed one rather diffident kiss in its palm.