. Give a man a chance to make
good. Do you think I'm such a fool as to throw away the love you've
got for me? . . . We'll try this nursing game together, but not at the
front, where the bullets are. I want us to live and to have our
chance, you yours and I mine--taken together. Don't you see that I am
speaking with every ounce of sincerity there is in me? I _couldn't_
take such love as yours and not make good. That's in my heart. I
couldn't, I couldn't. Isn't it in my face, too--isn't it?"

She did not answer at first, only looked in my face, her eyes flooding.

Then she said: "I don't see your face any more--only a kind of glory."

We ran slowly back to the city, slowly, and very peacefully. Now and
again we talked a little, and argued a little.

"But," she said, "it will ruin your life if you marry a servant. So
please, please don't! What would I do when I knew I'd hurt you?"

"There's no life to ruin, Hilda. What's been is just dust and ashes.
You and I--we'll live for each other, and we'll try to help where
help's needed. It will be fine for me to have helped, after all these
foolish years--when I did only harm, and only half-hearted harm at
that."

"It would be so different if only--if only----"

"If only I loved you?" I freed one hand from the steering wheel and
put my arm around her. "But you feel tenderness?"

"I feel tenderness."

I pressed her close to my side.

"Was I ever unkind to you?"

"Never."

"Tenderness and kindness--that's something to go on."

She turned her head and kissed the hand that pressed against her
shoulder. It was the slightest, gentlest, softest kiss, and a lump
rose in my throat.

"If the angels could see me now," she said, "and know what was in my
heart, they'd die of envy."

"And what's in your heart, Hilda?"

"You," she said.

The house where she was staying had an inner and an outer door. In the
obscurity between these two we stood for a little while at parting, and
kissed each other.

And as soon thereafter as could be, we were quietly married.

When I began to put down this story about the Fultons, I was still head
over heels in love with Lucy, and I did not know how it was all going
to end. And I don't know now. I began to write before Hilda became a
definite figure in my life, to write in order to pass the time. And so
I wrote until I realized that I had failed Lucy, and began to hope that
she had failed me. Even then I expected to