are
tell me that my dad wouldn't be worth loving if he'd been in prison forty
times?"

The color crept into his face. "I'm not quitting. I'm going through. The
point is whether I'm to ask my friends to carry my load for me."

"What are your friends for?" she demanded, and her eyes were like stars
in a field of snow. "Don't you see it's an insult to assume they don't
want to stand with you in your trouble? You've been warped. You're
eaten up with vain pride." Joyce bit her lip to choke back a swelling in
her throat. "The Dave we used to know wasn't like that. He was friendly
and sweet. When folks were kind to him he was kind to them. He wasn't
like--like an old poker." She fell back helplessly on the simile she had
used with her father.

"I don't blame you for feeling that way," he said gently. "When I first
came out I did think I'd play a lone hand. I was hard and bitter and
defiant. But when I met you-all again--and found you were just like home
folks--all of you so kind and good, far beyond any claims I had on
you--why, Miss Joyce, my heart went out to my old friends with a rush.
It sure did. Maybe I had to be stiff to keep from being mushy."

"Oh, if that's it!" Her eager face, flushed and tender, nodded approval.

"But you've got to look at this my way too," he urged. "I can't repay
your father's kindness--yes, and yours too--by letting folks couple your
name, even in friendship, with a man who--"

She turned on him, glowing with color. "Now that's absurd, Dave Sanders.
I'm not a--a nice little china doll. I'm a flesh-and-blood girl. And I'm
not a statue on a pedestal. I've got to live just like other people.
The trouble with you is that you want to be generous, but you don't want
to give other folks a chance to be. Let's stop this foolishness and be
sure-enough friends--Dave."

He took her outstretched hand in his brown palm, smiling down at her.
"All right. I know when I'm beaten."

She beamed. "That's the first honest-to-goodness smile I've seen on your
face since you came back."

"I've got millions of 'em in my system," he promised. "I've been hoarding
them up for years."

"Don't hoard them any more. Spend them," she urged.

"I'll take that prescription, Doctor Joyce." And he spent one as evidence
of good faith.

The soft and shining oval of her face rippled with gladness as a mountain
lake sparkles with sunshine in a light summer breeze. "I've found again
that Dave boy I lost," she told him.

"