mine.
I hope you won't mind our having a little time together. We won't do
anything very committal. It's as much friendship as anything. I go by
the evening train to-morrow."

"Mm," said Serope with his eye on Eleanor.

"In these uncertain times," he began.

"Why shouldn't I take a risk too, Daddy?" said Eleanor sharply.

"I know there's that side of it," said the young man. "I oughtn't to
have telegraphed," he said.

"Can't I take a risk?" exclaimed Eleanor. "I'm not a doll. I don't want
to live in wadding until all the world is safe for me."

Scrope looked at the glowing face of the young man.

"Is this taking care of her?" he asked.

"If you hadn't telegraphed--!" she cried with a threat in her voice, and
left it at that.

"Perhaps I feel about her--rather as if she was as strong as I am--in
those ways. Perhaps I shouldn't. I could hardly endure myself, Sir--cut
off from her. And a sort of blank. Nothing said."

"You want to work out your own salvation," said Scrope to his daughter.

"No one else can," she answered. "I'm--I'm grown up."

"Even if it hurts?"

"To live is to be hurt somehow," she said. "This--This--" She flashed
her love. She intimated by a gesture that it is better to be stabbed
with a clean knife than to be suffocated or poisoned or to decay....

Scrope turned his eyes to the young man again. He liked him. He liked
the modelling of his mouth and chin and the line of his brows. He liked
him altogether. He pronounced his verdict slowly. "I suppose, after
all," he said, "that this is better than the tender solicitude of a
safe and prosperous middleaged man. Eleanor, my dear, I've been thinking
to-day that a father who stands between his children and hardship, by
doing wrong, may really be doing them a wrong. You are a dear girl to
me. I won't stand between you two. Find your own salvation." He got up.
"I go west," he said, "presently. You, I think, go east."

"I can assure you, Sir," the young man began.

Scrope held his hand out. "Take your life in your own way," he said.

He turned to Eleanor. "Talk as you will," he said.

She clasped his hand with emotion. Then she turned to the waiting young
man, who saluted.

"You'll come back to supper?" Scrope said, without thinking out the
implications of that invitation.

She assented as carelessly. The fact that she and her lover were to
go, with their meeting legalized and blessed, excluded all other
considerations. The two young peo