n'--plannin' how to make a palace of it for you--for you. Why, I'd
work like a slave--"

He stopped short. Dave Cabarreux had never done an honest stroke of work
in his life. Nothing but planning. He remembered that in this imminent
moment, and laughed. "Miss Isabel, I've been a good-for-nothing dog:
that's the truth. Everybody knows it: you know it. But there's a woman
that I love who could put a new soul into my body. If she would."

They had halted by the fence now, and Isabel's hand was on the mossy
rail. He put his own over it. "If she would? Isabel, do you care for
me--at all?"

She looked up at the dark face full of tenderness and power. It seemed
as if the gods were coming very close to her indeed. "Yes, I care for
you," she said gently. "But I must go home--I must have time--I will not
hear more to-day."

But she waited to hear more. He only stooped and reverently kissed her
lips without a word. His brain reeled as it had done when he was going
into battle in the Wilderness. He had never worked, but he would--to win
her! He had not borne himself so badly in that other fight.

He lifted her into the buggy and walked beside her, his hand on the
reins, as the mule crept drowsily along the five miles between the
valley and the Calhoun farm. He spoke little. He was in a rapturous
dream, in which the warm sunlight, the woods, the soft fingers which he
touched now and then, bore a part.

Isabel talked or sang softly to herself, as she always did when she was
happy. Once he heard her say, "I should try oats in that meadow, if I
were you. And I should not be surprised if corundum could be found in
those rocks back of the house."

Oats and corundum?

Tears of vexation stood in her eyes as he looked at her perplexed. "It
is the farm I mean. You don't seem to have heard me. My father is so
practical! Indeed, indeed, it is only by hard work that you can gain his
consent."

"Oh, I understand perfectly," gazing dreamily into her eyes. "I shall go
to work upon that place: I shall tear it all up--next spring." He walked
on beside her. The golden light deepened in the west; the air was full
of delicious resinous odors from the pine forest; now and then he
pressed his lips to the warm, rose-tinted hand. Surely, he thought, this
divine draught which they had just begun to taste was not as sweet to
her as he found it, or she would not care to talk of oats and corundum.

When he left her he sauntered leisurely up the mou