more--Alexander, there is
something you must let me say. You've never thought about it much, but
you have such a beauty as would make you famous in any city of the
world. Men will come--and they won't be turned back."

For the first time since Aaron's death the old militant fire leaped
into her eyes and her chin came up as she flared into vehemence.

"Like hell they won't be turned back!"

But Brent smiled. "You think that now, but Alexander, nature is nature
and there must be something in your life. You've played at being a man
and done it better than many men--but men can marry women, and you
can't. Along that road lies a heart-breaking loneliness. Sometime
you'll see that, since you can't be a man, you'll want to be a man's
mate."

She shook her head with unconvinced obduracy.

"I knows ye aims ter give me kindly counsel, Mr. Brent, but ye're plum
wastin' yore breath."

The man rose. "After all, I only came to say good-bye," he told her.
"You aren't going to keep men from loving you. I know because I've
tried to keep myself from doing it--and I've failed. But this is
really my message. If you do change your ideas, for God's sake choose
your man carefully--and if you ever reach a point where you need
counsel, send for me."

Along Fifth Avenue from Washington Arch to the Plaza, Spring was in the
air. Trees were putting out that first green which, in its tenderness
of beauty, is all hope and confidence. With the tide of humanity
drifted Will Brent, whom business had brought from Kentucky to New
York, but his thoughts were back there in the hills where the almost
illiterate Diana, who knew nothing of life's nuances of refinement and
who yet had all of life's allurements, was facing her new loneliness.

He reached a bookstore and turned in, idly looking through volumes of
verse, while he killed the hour before his appointment. His hand fell
upon a small volume bearing the name of G. K. Chesterton, and opening
it at random he read those lines descriptive of the illuminated
breviary from which Alfred the Great, as a boy, learned his spiritual
primer at his mother's knee:

"It was wrought in the monk's slow manner of silver
and sanguine shell,
And its pictures were little and terrible keyholes of
Heaven and Hell."

Brent closed the covers with a snap. "That's what my memories of it
all come to," he mused, "'--little and terrible keyholes of Heaven and
Hell.'"

But that evenin