, Dorothy! You must wait!" he had cried, aware that his imperative
words clutched her like a detaining hand. Then, while his breath came
fast, almost chokingly, he had said: "Tell me, Dorothy, is it because
you don't call me _a man_ that you won't have me?"

The angry challenge in his voice hardened her.

"I don't know anything about how much of a man you are, Harry
Wakefield," she had declared, with freezing indifference. "I only know
you are not the man for me."

That had been practically the end of it. They had got through the day
very creditably he believed, and the next morning they had departed on
their several ways.

Wakefield had read law like mad for a week, and then he had started for
Colorado. He had a favorite cousin out there whose husband was making a
fortune in Lame Gulch stocks, and he thought that even prosaic
fortune-hunting in a new world would be better than the gnawing chagrin
that monopolized things in the old. Better be active than passive, on
any terms. By the time he was well on his westward way, the sting of
that refusal had yielded somewhat, and he began to take courage again.
Perhaps when he had made a fortune! "It takes a man to do that," she had
said. Well, he had four times the money to start with that Dick Dayton
had had, and look, what chances there were!

Once fairly launched in the stirring, out-of-door Colorado life, his
spirits had so far recovered their tone that he could afford to be
magnanimous. Accordingly he wrote the following letter to Dorothy:

"DEAR DOROTHY,

"You were right; I wasn't half good enough for you. No fellow is,
as far as that goes! Don't you let them fool you on that score! It
makes me mad when I think about it. You always knew the worst of
me, but you don't really know the first thing about any other man.
I'm coming back next year to try again. Do give me the chance,
Dorothy! Remember, I don't tell you you could make anything you
like of me--that's the rubbish the rest will talk. I'm going to
make something of myself first! And if I don't do it in a year, I
am ready to work seven years,--or seventy,--or seventy-seven years;
if you'll only have me in the end! That would have to be in Heaven,
though, wouldn't it? Well, it would come to the same thing in the
end! It would be Heaven for me, wherever it was!"

Wakefield had the habit of saying to Dorothy whatever came into his
head; and so he