and in his bearing of
dignified self-dependence. A quiver passed over Mr. Rose's strong,
square-cut countenance, his stern light-gray eyes softened to a
contradiction of his set mouth.

"I'm not in the habit of saying things twice," he curtly replied. "I
gave you leave to go when and where you pleased. To-morrow I'll fix your
bank account so you can draw all the money you like."

"Thank you, sir," Corrie acknowledged.

"You've no call to thank me," his father corrected. "I guess that when I
own millions you've got the right to all you can spend. It won't help
anything for you to be pinched or uncomfortable. I've no wish to see it.
I am going to take your sister to Europe for the winter, as I told her
this evening, so we ourselves leave soon after you. Try to keep
straighter, this time."

There was no intentional cruelty in the concluding sentence, delivered
as the speaker stepped back into the inner room, but Corrie turned so
white that Flavia sprang to him with a low exclamation of pain.

"It's all right," he reassured her. And after a moment: "Flavia, I am
going with Allan Gerard, to work under him and help him in his factory."

"Corrie?"

"I have been with him to-night. I don't want father to know this because
he wouldn't understand; he might even forbid me to go. Unless he forces
an answer, I shall not say where I am to be. But Gerard said I must tell
you everything and write to you often--I would have done that, anyhow.
You won't mind my going away, now, when you know I am with him?"

She comprehended at last the change in him, the change from restless
uncertainty to steady fixity of purpose, from an objectless wanderer to
a traveller towards a known destination, comprehended with a passionate
outrush of gratitude to the man who had wrought this in a generosity too
broad to remember his own injury. The eyes she lifted to her brother's
were splendidly luminous.

"No," she confirmed, in the exhaustion of relief. "I can bear to let you
go from me, if you are to be with Mr. Gerard."

They nestled together--as each might have clung in such an hour to the
mother they had left so far down the path of years--on the hearth from
which one was self-exiled and the other about to be taken.

"Do you remember the story he told us?" Corrie asked, after a long
pause. "About that Arabian fellow's vase and the pearls, you know?
I--well, I meant what I said, about expecting to have lots of days like
that, pearl-days. I co