"She wouldn't have run herself so far aground," he thought, "if I had been on the job a little more. I could have helped her to steer straighter. A word here and a lift there and she would have come through all right. Now something's got to stop her or she can't be stopped. She'll preach once too often out of the tail of a cart on the subject of equal guardianship,--and--" Beulah put her hands to her face suddenly, and, sinking back into the depths of the big cushioned chair on the edge of which she had been tensely poised during most of the conversation, burst into tears. "You're the only one that knows," she sobbed over and over again. "I'm so tired, Peter, but I've got to go on and on and on. If they stop me, I'll kill myself." Peter crossed the room to her side and sat down on her chair-arm. "Don't cry, dear," he said, with a hand on her head. "You're too tired to think things out now,--but I'll help you." She lifted a piteous face, for the moment so startlingly like that of the dead girl he had loved that his senses were confused by the resemblance. "How, Peter?" she asked. "How can you help me?" "I think I see the way," he said slowly. He slipped to his knees and gathered her close in his arms. "I think this will be the way, dear," he said very gently. "Does this mean that you want me to marry you?" she whispered, when she was calmer. "If you will, dear," he said. "Will you?" "I will,--if I can, if I can make it seem right to after I've thought it all out.--Oh! Peter, I love you. I love you." "I had no idea of that," he said gravely, "but it's wonderful that you do. I'll put everything I've got into trying to make you happy, Beulah." "I know you will, Peter." Her arms closed around his neck and tightened there. "I love you." He made her comfortable and she relaxed like a tired child, almost asleep under his soothing hand, and the quiet spell of his tenderness. "I didn't know it could be like this," she whispered. "But it can," he answered her. In his heart he was saying, "This is best. I am sure this is best. It is the right and normal way for her--and for me." In her tri-cornered dormitory room at the new school which she was not sharing with any one this year Eleanor, enveloped in a big brown and yellow wadded bathrobe, was writing a letter to Peter. Her hair hung in two golden brown braids over her shoulders and her pure profile was bent intently over the paper. At the moment when Beulah made her confession of love and closed her eyes against the breast of the man who had just asked her to marry him, two big tears forced their way between Eleanor's lids and splashed down upon her letter. CHAPTER XIX MOSTLY UNCLE PETER