One eager wild thought rushed through Martin's brain. It had made his blood race several times before, but he had thrown it aside because, during all their talks and walks, Joan had never once looked at him with anything but the eyes of a sister. As his wife he could free her, lift her out of her anomalous atmosphere and take her to the city to which her face was always turned. But he lacked the courage to speak and continued to hope that some day, by some miracle, she might become less superlatively neutral, less almost boyish in her way of treating him. He threw it aside again, tempted as he was to take advantage of a chance to bribe her into becoming his wife with an offer of life. Then too, she was only eighteen, and although he was twenty-four and in the habit of thinking of himself as a man of ripe years, he had to confess that the mere idea of marriage made him feel awfully young and scared. And so he said nothing and went on hoping. Joan broke the silence. "Everything will be different when Mother comes back," she said. "I shall live with her then, and I give you my word I'll make up for lost time. So who cares? There are three good hours before I face Grandmother. Let's enjoy ourselves." IV Martin couldn't settle down after his solitary dinner that night. Several times he had jumped out of his father's reading chair and stood listening at the window. It seemed to him that some one had called his name. But the only sounds that broke the exquisite quietude of the night were the distant barking of a dog, the whirl of an automobile on the road or the pompous crowing of a master of a barnyard, taken up and answered by others near and far. Each time the boy had stood at the open window and peered out eagerly and wistfully, but nothing had moved across the moon-bathed lawn or disturbed the sleeping flowers. Under the cold light of the stars the earth appeared to be more than usually peaceful and drowsy. All was well. But the boy's blood tingled, and he was filled with an unexplainable sense of excitement. Some one needed him, and he wanted urgently to be needed. He turned from the window and ran his eyes over the long, wide, low-ceilinged masculine room, every single thing in which spelled Father to him; then he went back to the chair the right to sit in which had been given to him by death, persuaded that over the unseen wires that stretch from heart to heart a signal had been sent, certain that he was to hold himself in readiness to do something for Joan.