out into the rose-scented sunshine.

With a sad look in his eyes Willie let him go, watching the tall form
as it strode waist-high through the brakes and sweet fern that patched
the meadow. It was his first real quarrel with Janoah. Since boyhood
they had been friends, the gentleness of the little inventor bridging
the many disagreements that had arisen between them. Now had come this
mammoth difference, a divergence of standard too vital to be smoothed
over by a gloss of cajolery. Willie was angry through every fiber of
his being. Slowly it seeped into his consciousness that Janoah's
fundamental philosophy and his own were at odds; their attitude of mind
as antagonistic as the poles. Against trust loomed suspicion, against
generosity narrowness, against optimism pessimism. Janoah believed the
worst of the individual while he, Willie, reason as he might,
inherently believed the best. One creed was the fruit of a jealous and
envious personality that rejoiced rather than grieved over the
limitations of our human clay; the other was a result of that charity
_that beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things_,
because of a divine faith in the God in man.

For a long time Willie stood there thinking, his gaze fixed upon the
gently swaying plumage of the pines. The shock of his discovery left
him suddenly feeling very sad and very much alone. It was as if he had
buried the friend of half a century. Yet even to bring Janoah back he
could not retract the words he had uttered or exchange the light he
followed for Janoah's sinister beckonings. In spite of a certain
reasonableness in the pessimist's logic; in spite of circumstances he
was incapable of explaining; in spite, even, of Cynthia Galbraith, a
latent belief in Robert Morton's integrity crystallized into certainty,
and he rose to his feet freed of the doubts that had previously
assailed him.

At the instant of this emancipation the young man himself entered.

What had passed during the interval since he had gone out of the
workshop Willie could only surmise, but it had evidently been of
sufficiently inspiring a character to bring into his countenance a
radiance almost supernatural in its splendor. Nevertheless he did not
speak but stood immovable before the little old inventor as if awaiting
a judge's decree, the glory fading from his eyes and a half-veiled
anxiety stealing into them.

Willie smiled and, reaching up, placed his hands on th