now as his very
nature; and that was large indeed.

Yet never once in all the years had he imagined the sacrilege of making
her his wife, until there came the farewell letter from his father in
prison; that man used to reading the hearts of men, who saw the truth
between the lines of his son's letters, and deliberately gave the woman
both loved into his son's keeping.

"She is still young," Jacques Benoix had written, "and you are young,
and my time is over. You must be to her what I would have been. We must
consider now nothing but her greatest happiness, you and I, her greatest
good."

Since then Philip, if he had not thought of it before, thought of little
else than of marrying Kate Kildare.

Not soon, of course; not until time should have brought its blessed balm
of forgetfulness, when both the girls would be married and gone,
perhaps, and she in her loneliness would turn to him. Meanwhile he must
be at hand to take care of her, as his father had bidden him; to watch
over her unobtrusively, helping her as he had with Jacqueline, sharing
any trouble that came to her; making himself necessary in every way
possible, so that more and more he should take with her the place of his
father.

Kate was wrong in her ideas that his poverty had much influence upon
Philip. Poverty and wealth mean little to the idealist; and his faith
was very strong. He knew that if God gave this beloved woman into his
keeping, He would provide very surely the means of keeping her.

He was patient, too; yet lately all the talk of love and of marriage,
the companionship of wistful, lovelorn Jacqueline, perhaps, the sight of
James Thorpe's almost fatuous happiness, had made patience newly
difficult; had stirred a restlessness in him that sometimes he believed
his lady noticed. When she was in the room with him, whether they spoke
or not, he found it almost impossible to keep his eyes from her; and
when at such times their glances met, it seemed to him there was a quick
flash of response in hers, an understanding look, almost of expectancy,
as if she were waiting for him to say something he did not say.

Philip was of course right. Nothing of the change in him had been lost
on Kate; only she attributed it unfortunately to another cause--to
Jacqueline.

She was chattering desultorily about many things, as they sat there in
the deepening November dusk, by the fire; but he did not hear what she
was saying. He began to look covetously out of t