ou mean you--bought it, yourself?" he marvelled.

Then, face uplifted, brave-eyed, she went on a little breathlessly.

"I bought it, myself," she said, "the week you went away." And, in a
muffled whisper: "Denny, I didn't have faith--not much, at first. But
I meant to be here when you did come, just--just because I thought you
might need me--mighty badly. And waiting is hard, too, when one hasn't
faith. And I did wait! That was something, wasn't it, Denny?
Only--only now, today, I--I think I realized that my own need of you
is greater than yours could ever be for me!"

She sat, lips apart, quiet for his answer.

An odd smile edged the boy's lips at her wistful earnestness. It was a
twisted little smile which might have been born of the pain of
stinging lids and dryer, aching throat. He could not have spoken at
that moment had he tried. Instead he lifted her bodily and drew her
huddled little figure into his arms. It was his first face to face
glimpse of the wonder of woman.

But he knew now something which she had only sensed; he knew that the
big, lonesome, bewildered boy whom she had tried to comfort in his
bitterness that other night when she had hidden her own hurt
disappointment with the white square card within her breast, had come
back all man.

He looked down at her--marvelled at her very littleness as though it
were a thing he had never known before.

"And--and you still--would stay?" he managed to ask, at last. "You'd
stay--even if it did mean being like them," he inclined his head
toward the distant village, "like them, old and wrinkled and worn-out,
before they have half lived their lives?"

She nodded her head vehemently against his coat. He felt her thin arms
tighten and tighten about him.

"I'll stay," she repeated after him in a childishly small voice.
"You--you see, I _know_ what it is now to be alone, even just for a
week or two. I think I'll stay, please!"

There had been a bit of a teasing lilt in her half smothered words. It
disappeared now.

"I--I'd be pretty lonesome, all the rest of my life--man--if I
didn't!"

And long afterward she lifted her head from his arm and blinked at him
from sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes.

"Why, Denny?" she asked in drowsy curiosity. "Why did you go--why,
really? Don't you realize that you haven't told me even yet?"

He rose and lifted her to her feet, but that did not cover the slow
flush that stained his face--the old, vaguely embarrassed flush that
sh