antly on Milly's ears. But she says nothing: she does not mean to
be "soft" this time. Yet in reply to another compliment, she admits,
smiling delphically,--"Yes, I _am_ a woman!"

The man takes up another verse of his song, for he has planned this
attack carefully while the swift wheels were turning off the miles
between Washington and Chicago.

"You want your little girl to have a home, too, don't you? A real home,
_your_ home, where she can get the right sort of start in life?"

"Yes," Milly assents quickly. "The proper kind of home means so much
more to a girl than to a boy. If I myself had had--" But she stops
before this baseness to poor old Horatio. "I want Virgie's life to be
different from mine--so utterly different!"

A wave of self-pity for her loneliness after all her struggle sweeps
over her and casts a cloud on her face.

"You can't be a business woman and make that kind of home for your
daughter," Duncan persists, pushing forward his point.

Milly shakes her head.

"I'm afraid a woman can't!" she sighs.

(She doesn't feel it necessary to tell him that for almost one hour by
the clock she has not been a "business woman," even in the legal sense
of the term.)

"Oh," she murmurs, as if convinced by his logic, "I'm good for
nothing--I can't even be a good mother!"

"You are good for everything--for me!"

But Milly is not ready yet. In this sort of transaction she has grown to
be a more expert trader than she was once.

"It must be the right man," she observes impersonally.

And the Ranchman takes another start. He paints glowingly the freedom
and the beauty of that outdoors life on the Pacific Coast,--the fragrant
lemon orchard with its golden harvest of yellow balls, the velvety
heavens spangled with stars each night, the blooming roses, etc., etc.
But he cannot keep long off the personal note.

"I've sat there nights on my veranda, and thought and thought of you,
Milly, until it seemed as though you were really there by my side and I
could almost touch you."

"Really!" Milly is becoming moved in spite of herself. Somehow Duncan's
words have a genuine ring to them. "I believe," she muses, "that you
_are_ the sort of man who could care always for a woman."

"I always have cared for one woman!"

"You are good, Edgar."

"I don't know about that. Good hasn't much to do between men and women
when they love.... It's always love that counts, isn't it?"

(Milly is not as sure of that doctrine