eek or so and think it over."

"But there's something I want you to do for me immediately, Joe."

"What's that?"

"I want the old house put in order. I'm going to live there."

"Alone?"

"I'm almost twenty-seven, and that's being enough of an old maid for me
to risk Canaan's thinking me eccentric, isn't it?"

"It will think anything you do is all right."

"And once," she cried, "it thought everything I did all wrong!"

"Yes. That's the difference."

"You mean it will commend me because I'm thought rich?"

"No, no," he said, meditatively, "it isn't that. It's because everybody
will be in love with you."

"Quite everybody!" she asked.

"Certainly," he replied. "Anybody who didn't would be absurd."

"Ah, Joe!" she laughed. "You always were the nicest boy in the world,
my dear!"

At that he turned toward her with a sudden movement and his lips
parted, but not to speak. She had rested one arm upon the desk, and her
cheek upon her hand; the pen she had picked up, still absently held in
her fingers, touching her lips; and it was given to him to know that he
would always keep that pen, though he would never write with it again.
The soft lamplight fell across the lower part of her face, leaving her
eyes, which were lowered thoughtfully, in the shadow of her hat. The
room was blotted out in darkness behind her. Like the background of an
antique portrait, the office, with its dusty corners and shelves and
hideous safe, had vanished, leaving the charming and thoughtful face
revealed against an even, spacious brownness. Only Ariel and the roses
and the lamp were clear; and a strange, small pain moved from Joe's
heart to his throat, as he thought that this ugly office, always before
so harsh and grim and lonely--loneliest for him when it had been most
crowded,--was now transfigured into something very, very different from
an office; that this place where he sat, with a lamp and flowers on a
desk between him and a woman who called him "my dear," must be
like--like something that people called "home."

And then he leaned across the desk toward her, as he said again what he
had said a little while before,--and his voice trembled:

"Ariel, it IS you?"

She looked at him and smiled.

"You'll be here always, won't you? You're not going away from Canaan
again?"

For a moment it seemed that she had not heard him. Then her bright
glance at him wavered and fell. She rose, turning slightly away from
him, but n