."

"He said that--I had reached for something beyond my grasp. That my
fingers would touch it, but that it would soar always above me."

"Sounds as if Brooks were some fat sort of a bird. I can't think of him
as soaring. I should call him the cock that crowed at Crossroads. Oh,
it's all rot, Eve, this idea that love makes things equal. I went to the
Hippodrome not long ago and saw 'Pinafore.' Our fathers and mothers raved
over it. But that was a sentimental age, and Gilbert poked fun at them.
He made the simple sailor a captain in the end, so that Josephine
shouldn't wash dishes and cook smelly things in pots and hang out the
family wash. But your hero balks and won't be turned into a millionaire.
If you were writing a book you might make it work out to your
satisfaction, but you can't twist life to the happy ending."

"I shall try, Pip."

"In Heaven's name, Eve! It is sheer obstinacy. If everybody wanted you to
marry Brooks, you'd want to marry me. But because Aunt Maude and Winifred
and I, and a lot of others know that you shouldn't, you have set your
heart on it."

She flashed her eyes at him. "Is it obstinacy, Pip, I wonder? Do you know
I rather think I am going to like it."

Her letters said something of the sort to Richard. "I shall love it down
there. But you must let me have my own way with the house and garden.
Don't you think I shall make a charming chatelaine, Dicky, dear?"

He had a sense of relief in her unexpected acquiescence in his decision.
If she had objected, he would have felt as if he had turned his back not
only on the work that he hated but on the woman he had promised to marry.
It would have looked that way to others. Yet no matter how it had looked,
he could not have done differently. The call had been insistent, and the
deeps of his nature been stirred.

He was thinking of it all as one morning in October he rode to the
Playhouse on big Ben to see Beulah.

Dismounting at the gate, he followed the path which led to the kitchen.
Beulah was not there, and, searching, he saw her under an old apple tree
at the end of the garden. She wore a checked blue apron, stiffly
starched, and she was holding it up by the corners. A black cat and three
sable kittens frisked at her feet.

Some one was dropping red apples carefully into the apron, some one who
laughed as he swung himself down and tipped Beulah's chin up with his
hand and kissed her. Richard felt a lump in his throat. It was such a
hom