euced glad to see you back again."

"And--Quita?"

"Deuced glad also, I suspect."

"Uncommonly kind of you both keeping her all this while."

"Kind? It's been a privilege seeing so much of her. We shall grudge
giving her up."

And Desmond bestowed a reflective glance on the man who guessed nothing
of the revelation in store for him.

Their talk riding back to the station was fitful and fragmentary. All
that remained to be said--and there was a good deal of it--would come
out bit by bit, at odd moments, mainly under the influence of tobacco.
In the meantime, their mutual satisfaction went deeper than speech; and
it was enough.

At the drawing-room door they parted.

"You'll find all you need in there, I think," Desmond said, on a note
of profound understanding; and Lenox, putting a strong hand upon
himself, pushed aside the heavy curtain and stood, at last, before his
wife.

With a low cry, and arms outflung, she came to him; and that first
rapture of reunion, of the heart's passionate upheaval and
revealing--the more intense for the muteness of it--was a rapture
sacred to themselves alone; not to be pried upon or set down. Such
moments--come they but once in a lifetime, to one among a hundred--are
God's reiterate answers to the problem of creation. The man or woman
who has passed that way will never ask the soul's most withering
question: To what end was I born? 'The rest may reason and welcome.'
They are of the few who know.

Lenox and Quita swept headlong, as it were, to the crest of a wave,
dropped presently back to earth. Then he set her a little away from
him, almost at arm's-length, the better to feast his eyes upon the
sight of her; and so became aware of the subtle change perceptible in
her letters:--some exquisite quality, the fruit of long waiting,
crowned by the miracle of motherhood; an appreciable softening of the
lips; a triumph of the essential woman over mere line and curve that
brought her near to actual beauty. But it was the new depth and
tenderness in her eyes that drew and held him; eyes luminous, as never
before, with the pride, the exaltation, of a consummate
self-surrender,--not of necessity, but of free choice, the woman's
utmost gift to her own one lover and compeer in all the world; if so be
that she is privileged to find him, and if so be that he himself
aspires to the larger claim. Eldred Lenox had so aspired; and, in
consequence, had attained. Her mute confession of