rave enough to
think, not what is our will, but what is our duty. Think of the awful
responsibility, whichever way we choose."

"I can't," said Adam. "I can't think of anything but you."

"Nor I of aught but you," she said, moving away, "when you hold me so.
But we _must_ think."

"I have," answered Adam, gravely. "All my life I have thought. I have
wanted the perfect companionship of the one woman in all the world who
could give it; I have always known she would come. I have wanted a
home; I have wanted to see my sons and daughters grow up about me. I
wanted to be a power for good in this world of which we are a part,
and where we live for some good purpose, if there be any purpose in
life. I have so conducted myself that I can look a good woman in the
face, and offer her my life, for whatever it is worth, without damning
recollections to come between us. My children will have a clean
heritage of blood and name. The family tree was scoffed at in America,
but, thank God, mine was an oak that had weathered many a gale. Not
very great folk, but honest, upright, fearless men and women, true to
their king or their country and their faiths; true to their ideals,
too, when their fellows were content with realities only. Any man who
gives his children such a heritage as that can say with more truth
than Napoleon said to his soldiers, 'Fifty centuries look down upon
you.' I wanted to make the world a little better for my life, and I
wanted my children brought up to feel that their lives belonged first
to their country, to live or die for her."

"I know," said Robin, softly; "I used to think I would drape the flag
over my baby's cradle, and embroider it on his pinning blanket."

"We are probably a pair of sentimental fools," he went on, "but I
believe in sentiment. A man could not say this out loud because
sentiment was supposed to be essentially womanish. How those old
distinctions weary one, with their scientific data to prove that men
surpass women in the senses of feeling and taste, while women have
better sight and hearing, and so on through every conceivable
maundering of the human brain, forever harping on differences and
accentuating them, forever dwelling on sex distinctions and never on a
common humanity."

"It was a dreadfully scientific age," she assented, "a generation
fearfully and wonderfully given over to statistics; and yet how many
dreamers there were!"

"Yes, but in the twentieth century a young man d