ntendent--the idle Chiawassee plant as
a test and experimental shop for American Aqueduct, was indemnifying
himself for the long exile.

On this Saturday evening in the lovers' month of June he had walked
Ardea around and about through the fragrant summer wood of the upper
creek valley, retracing, in part, the footsteps of the boy whose fishing
had been spoiled and the little girl who was to be bullied into
submission; and so rambling they had come at length to the old
moss-grown foot-log which had been a newly-felled tree in the former
time. Tom went first across the rustic bridge, holding the hand of
ecstatic thrillings, and pausing in mid-passage that he might have
excuse for holding it the longer. Ah me! we were all young once; and
some of us are still young,--God grant,--in heart if not in years.

It was during the mid-passage pause, and while she was looking down on
the swirling waters sometime of terrifying, that Miss Dabney said:

"How deep is it, Tom? Would I really have drowned if you and Hector had
not pulled me out?"

He laughed.

"It's a thankless thing to spoil an idyl, isn't it? But that is the way
with all the little playtime heroics we leave behind in childhood. You
could have waded out."

She made the adorable little grimace which was one of the survivals of
the yesterdays, and suffered him to lead her across.

"And I have always believed that I owed my life to you--and Hector!" she
said reproachfully.

"You owe me much more than that," he affirmed broadly, when they had sat
down to rest--they had often to do this, lest the way should prove
shorter than the happy afternoon--on the end of the bridge log.

"Money?"--flippantly.

"No; love. If it hadn't been for me, you might never have known what
love is."

His saying it was only an upbubbling of love's audacity, but she chose
to take it seriously. She was gazing afar into the depths of the
fresh-green forest darkening softly to the sunset, with her hands
clasped around the tangle of late-blooming white azaleas in her lap.

"It is a high gift," she said soberly; "the highest of all for a woman.
Once I thought I should live and die without knowing it, as many women
do. I wish I might give you something as great."

"I am already overpaid," he asserted. "For a man there is nothing so
great, no influence so nearly omnipotent, as the love of a good woman.
It is the lever that moves the world--what little it does move--up the
hill to the high