ng you?"

"No," Emily answered. "I will wait for you."

She might have walked back alone, if she had chosen. But instead she
sat down on a boulder near the hedge, folding her hands in her lap
like a demure child. The house was so dull, so hopelessly monotonous
contrasted with this fresh, wind-tossed outdoors and Lestrange in his
vigor of life and glamour of ultramodern adventure.

"You and Mr. Ffrench are very good," Lestrange said presently. "I am
afraid I appreciate it more than Rupert, though."

"Is he really afraid of horses?"

"I should not wonder; I never tried him. But he is amazingly
truthful."

Their eyes met across the strip of sunny road as they smiled; again
Emily felt the sudden confidence, the falling away of all constraint
before the direct clarity of his regard.

"You won your race," she said irrelevantly. "I was glad, since you
wanted it."

"Thank you," he returned with equal simplicity. "But I did not want it
that way, so far as I was concerned."

"Yet, it was the next step?"

"Yes, it was the next step. I meant that one does not care to be
victor because the leading cars were wrecked. There is no elation in
defeating a driver who lies out on the course. But, as you say, it
helped my purpose. You," he hesitated for the right phrase, "you are
most kind to recall that I have a purpose."

It was the convent-bred Emily who looked back at him, earnest-eyed,
exaltedly serious.

"I have thought of it often. Every one else that I know just lives the
way things happen--there are only a few people who grasp things and
_make_ them happen. That is real work; so many of us are just given
work we do not want--" she broke off.

"If we do not want the work, it is probably not our own," said
Lestrange. "Unless we have brought it on ourselves by a fault we must
undo--I need not speak of that to you. One must not make the mistake
of assuming some one else's work."

He spoke gently, almost as if with a clairvoyant reading of her
tendency to self-immolation.

"But may not some one else's fault be given us to undo?" she asked
eagerly. "May not their work be forced on us?"

"No," he answered.

"No?" bewildered.

"I don't think so. Each one of us has enough with his own, at least
so it seems to me. Most of us die before we finish it."

Emily paused, contending with the loneliness and doubts which impelled
her to speech, the feminine yearning to let another decide her
problems. This other's nonchalan