"That's why Miss Jane couldn't leave it to Asher's son," she murmured. Then she read the will of the late Jane Aydelot. When she lifted her face from its pages, her fair cheeks were pink with excitement, her deep violet eyes were shining, her lips were parted in a glad smile. She went down to the meadow fence and plucked the first little golden sunflower from its stem, and stood holding it as she looked away to where the three headlands stood up clear and shimmering in the light of the May afternoon. That night two letters were hurried to the postoffice. One went no farther than Wykerton to tell Darley Champers that Leigh would heartily approve of any action he might take in the business that was taking him to Ohio. CHAPTER XXII THE FARTHER WILDERNESS And beyond the baths of sunset found new worlds. --London. Dr. Carey and Thaine Aydelot sat watching the play of a fountain in a moonlit garden of tropical loveliness. In the Manila hospital Thaine had gone far down the Valley of the Shadow of Death before he reached a turning point. But youth, good blood, a constitution seasoned by camp and field, the watchful care of his physician, and the blessing of the Great Physician, from whom is all health, at last prevailed, and he came back sturdily to life and strength. As the two men sat enjoying the hour Dr. Carey suddenly asked: "After this hospital service, what next?" "How soon does this involuntary servitude end?" Thaine inquired. "A fortnight will do all that is possible for us," Carey answered. "Then I'll enlist with the regulars," Thaine declared. "Do you mean to follow a military life?" Carey inquired, bending forward to watch the play of light on the silvery waters, unconscious of the play of moonbeams on his silvery hair. "No, not always," Thaine responded. "Then why don't you go home now?" Carey went on. Thaine sat silent for some minutes. Then he rose to his full height, the strong, muscular, agile embodiment of military requirement. On his face the firing line had graven a nobility the old brown Kansas prairies had never seen. He did not know how to tell Dr. Carey, because he did not yet fully understand himself, that war to him must be a means, not an end, to his career; nor that in the long quiet hours in the hospital the call of the Kansas prairies, half a world away, was beginning to reach his ears, the belief that the man behind the plow may be no less a patriot than the man behind the gun; that the lifelong influence of his farmer father and mother was unconsciously winning him back to the peaceful struggle with the soil. At length he said slowly: