we gain a day we have scored a
victory; when the wilderness puts us back an hour, we have suffered a
defeat. Our ammunition is Time; our small shot the minutes, our heavy
ordnance the hours!"

The girl placed her hand on his shoulder. He covered it with his own.

"But we win!" he cried. "We win!"

"That is what I like," she said softly, "the strong spirit that wins!"
She hesitated, then went on gently, "But the battlefields, Harry; to
me they are dreadful. I went walking yesterday morning, before you came
over, and after a while I found myself in the most awful place. The
stumps of trees, the dead branches, the trunks lying all about, and the
glaring hot sun over everything! Harry, there was not a single bird in
all that waste, a single green thing. You don't know how it affected me
so early in the morning. I saw just one lonesome pine tree that had been
left for some reason or another, standing there like a sentinel. I could
shut my eyes and see all the others standing, and almost hear the birds
singing and the wind in the branches, just as it is here." She seized
his fingers in her other hand. "Harry," she said earnestly, "I don't
believe I can ever forget that experience, any more than I could have
forgotten a battlefield, were I to see one. I can shut my eyes now, and
can see this place our dear little wooded knoll wasted and blackened as
that was."

The man twisted his shoulder uneasily and withdrew his hand.

"Harry," she said again, after a pause, "you must promise to leave this
woods until the very last. I suppose it must all be cut down some day,
but I do not want to be here to see after it is all over."

Thorpe remained silent.

"Men do not care much for keepsakes, do they, Harry?--they don't save
letters and flowers as we girls do--but even a man can feel the value
of a great beautiful keepsake such as this, can't he, dear? Our
meeting-place--do you remember how I found you down there by the old
pole trail, staring as though you had seen a ghost?--and that beautiful,
beautiful music! It must always be our most sacred memory. Promise me
you will save it until the very, very last."

Thorpe said nothing because he could not rally his faculties. The
sentimental association connected with the grove had actually never
occurred to him. His keepsakes were impressions which he carefully
guarded in his memory. To the natural masculine indifference toward
material bits of sentiment he had added the instinct of