back and
won her for my wife, but I didn't. I sent the message to her by a servant
boy--and she has been happy always in her love."

Doctor Carey turned his face away for the moment. Thaine Aydelot's eyes
were so much like Virginia Thaine's to him just then. Presently he went
on:

"Sometimes the thing we fail to get helps us to know better how to live
and to live happily. You will not be a coward, Thaine, when you come,
year by year, to know the greater wilderness inside yourself. You will go
back to the prairies where you belong, as you say, and you will do a man's
part in the big world that's always needing men."

Thaine recalled the evening hour when he and Leigh were on the Purple
Notches and he had declared in the pride of his nineteen years that he
wanted to go out into the big world that is always needing men and do a
man's part there.

"If the big world needs men anywhere, it is on the old prairies," he
declared, and the doctor continued: "I have found my future already. I
shall not leave China again. Grass River may miss me as a friend but not
as a doctor of medicine. Doctors are too plentiful there. My place is here
henceforth, and I'm still young. I came to the Philippines to be with
Thaine"--Horace Carey's voice was low, and the same old winning smile was
on his face--"because I love the boy and because I wanted to protect him
if it should be my fortune to do it. I saved him from the waters of the
Rio Grande and helped to pull him out of the hospital at Manila. He
doesn't need me now, for he goes to do a big work, and I stay here to do a
big work."

"Out of love for me alone?" Thaine asked affectionately, throwing one arm
about Horace Carey's shoulder.

"No, not you alone," Carey answered frankly, "but because something in
your face always reminds me of a face I loved long ago. Of one for whose
sake I have cared for you here. You are going home a brave man. I believe
your life will be full of service and of happiness."

The silence that followed was broken by Pryor Gaines saying:

"All this time--such a tragical time--I have forgotten, Thaine, that I
have a message for you, a little package that reached here late last May.
It was sent to me because the sender thought you were coming to China
soon, and I was asked to keep it for you. You didn't come, and mails
ceased to leave Peking--and then came the siege, the struggle to keep up
the defenses, the sickness, the starvation, the deaths, the constant