“Wait,” she demanded, putting her hand against his shoulder. “It isn’t so simple. I am wealthy. You are able and you have a kind of undying energy in you. I want to give both my wealth and your ability to children--our children. That will not be easy for you. It means giving up your dreams of power. Perhaps I shall lose courage. Women do after two or three have come. You will have to furnish that. You will have to make a mother of me and keep making a mother of me. You will have to be a new kind of father with something maternal in you. You will have to be patient and studious and kind. You will have to think of these things at night instead of thinking of your own advancement. You will have to live wholly for me because I am to be their mother, giving me your strength and courage and your good sane outlook on things. And then when they come you will have to give all these things to them day after day in a thousand little ways.” Sam took her into his arms and for the first time in his memory the hot tears stood in his eyes. The horse, unattended, wheeled, threw up his head and trotted off down the path. They let him go, walking along after him hand in hand like two happy children. At the entrance to the park they came up to him, held by a park policeman. She got on the horse and Sam stood beside her looking up. “I’ll tell the colonel in the morning,” he said. “What will he say?” she murmured, musingly. “Damned ingrate,” Sam mimicked the colonel’s blustering throat tones. She laughed and picked up the reins. Sam laid his hand on hers. “How soon?” he asked. She put her head down near his. “We’ll waste no time,” she said, blushing. And then in the presence of a park policeman, in the street by the entrance to the park with the people passing up and down, Sam had his first kiss from Sue Rainey’s lips. After she rode away Sam walked. He had no sense of the passing of time, wandering through street after street, rearranging and readjusting his outlook on life. What she had said had stirred every vestige of sleeping nobility in him. He thought that he had got hold of the thing he had unconsciously been seeking all his life. His dreams of control of the Rainey Arms Company and the other big things he had planned in business seemed, in the light of their talk, so much nonsense and vanity. “I will live for this! I will live for this!” he kept saying over and over to himself. He imagined he could see the little white things lying in Sue’s arms, and his new love for her and for what they were to accomplish together ran through him and hurt him so that he felt like shouting in the darkened streets. He looked up at the sky and saw the stars and thought they looked down on two new and glorious beings living on the earth.