self-possession, her high-bred gallantry of manner, and even the
shining gloss on her black, beribboned hair, and her high boots,
produced in me a sense of remoteness, which I found it impossible
altogether to overcome.

In a little while there was a flutter on the staircase, and the other
girls trooped down, with Sally in their midst. She had changed her
travelling dress for a gown of white, cut low at the neck, and about her
throat she wore a necklace of pearls I had given her at her wedding.
There was a bright flush in her face, and she looked to me as she had
done that day, in her red shoes, in Saint John's churchyard.

When I came downstairs from my dressing-room, I found that the girls had
gone, and she was standing by the dinner table, with her face bent down
over the vase of pink roses in the centre.

"So we are in our own home, darling, at last," I said, and a few minutes
later, as I looked across the pink candle shades and the roses, and saw
her sitting opposite to me, I told myself that at last both the fighter
in me and the dreamer had found the fulfilment of their desire.

After dinner, when I had had my smoke in the library, we caught hands
and wandered like two children over the new house--into the pink and
white guest room, and then into Sally's bedroom, where the blue roses
sprawled over the chintz-covered furniture and the silk curtains. A
glass door gave on a tiny balcony, and throwing a shawl about her head
and her bare shoulders, she went with me out into the frosty December
night, where a cold bright moon was riding high above the church
steeples. With my arm about her, and her head on my breast, we stood in
silence gazing over the city, while the sense of her nearness, of her
throbbing spirit and body, filled my heart with an exquisite peace.

"You and I are the world, Ben."

"You are my world, anyway."

"It is such a happy world to-night. There is nothing but love in it--no
pain, no sorrow, no disappointment. Why doesn't everybody love, I
wonder?"

"Everybody hasn't you."

"I'm so sorry for poor Aunt Mitty,--she never loved,--and for poor Aunt
Matoaca, because she didn't love my lover. Oh, you are so strong, Ben;
that, I think, is why I first loved you! I see you always in the
background of my thoughts pushing that wheel up the hill."

"That won you. And to think if I'd known you were there, Sally, I
couldn't have done it."

"That, too, is why I love you, so there's another reason!