say if
he ever addressed her. He did not, however, go about it in the way he
had planned. It seemed to him to come up spontaneously. Under the spell
of the Summer night they had drifted into talking of old times, and they
both softened as their memory went back to their youth and their
friendship that had begun among the Southern woods and had lasted so
many years.

She had spoken of the influence his opinions had had with her.

"Do you know," he said presently, "I think you have exerted more
influence on my life than any one else I ever knew after I grew up?"

She smiled, and her face was softer than usual.

"I should be very glad to think that, for I think there are few men who
set out in life with such ideals as you had and afterwards
realize them."

Keith thought of his father and of how steadily that old man had held to
his ideals through everything. "I have not realized them," he said
firmly. "I fear I have lost most of them. I set out in life with high
ideals, which I got from my father; but, somehow, I seem to have
changed them."

She shook her head, with a pleasant light in her eyes.

"I do not think you have. Do you remember what you said to me once about
your ideal?"

He turned and faced her. There was an expression of such softness and
such sweetness in her face that a kind of anticipatory happiness fell
on him.

"Yes; and I have always been in love with that ideal," he said gravely.

She said gently: "Yes, I knew it."

"Did you?" asked Keith, in some surprise. "I scarcely knew it myself,
though I believe I have been for some time."

"Yes?" she said. "I knew that too."

Keith bent over her and took both her hands in his. "I love and want
love in return--more than I can ever tell you."

A change came over her face, and she drew in her breath suddenly,
glanced at him for a second, and then looked away, her eyes resting at
last on the distance where a ship lay, her sails hanging idly in the dim
haze. It might have been a dream-ship. At Keith's words a picture came
to her out of the past. A young man was seated on the ground, with a
fresh-budding bush behind him. Spring was all about them. He was young
and slender and sun-browned, with deep-burning eyes and close-drawn
mouth, with the future before him; whatever befell, with the hope and
the courage to conquer. He had conquered, as he then said he would to
the young girl seated beside him.

"When I love," he was saying, "she must fill full t