on looking for it their whole lives through."

He smiled at her with a tenderness which seemed, somehow, a part of his
strength. "But yours was the easier fate," he said.

"Is it the easier? I hardly know," she answered, and the note of pain in
her voice entered his heart. "I sometimes think that the best of life is
to go on wanting till one dies."

"Not the best--not the best," he responded, with a touch of his
whimsical humour. "I have had my share of wanting and I speak of what I
know. It all comes right in the end, I suppose, but it's a pretty tough
experience while it lasts, and, after all, we live in the minute not in
eternity."

Her gaze had dropped away from him, but at his words she lifted her eyes
again to meet his look.

"I wonder what it was you wanted so," she said--for he impressed her
suddenly as possessing a force of will which it would be not only
ineffectual, but even foolish to resist. The aggressive bulk of Perry
Bridewell, the impetuous egoism of Kemper showed, not as strength, but
as violence compared to the power which controlled the man at her side.
Where had he found this power? she wondered, and by what miracle had he
been able to make it his own?

"If I told you, I dare say it wouldn't enlighten you much," he answered.
"Isn't it enough to confess that I've done my share of crying for the
moon?"

"And if it had dropped into your hands, you would have found, probably,
that it was made only of green cheese," she replied.

For an instant he looked at her with a glance in which his humour
seemed to cover a memory which she could not grasp.

"Oh, well, I'd have risked it!" he retorted almost gayly.

CHAPTER X

THE END OF THE PATH

Having decided that Laura was to be married on the nineteenth of
December, Mrs. Payne had gathered not only the invitations, but the
entire trousseau into the house three weeks before the date upon which
she had fixed. Laura, who had at first entered enthusiastically into the
question of clothes, had shown during the last fortnight an indifference
which was almost an open avoidance of the subject; and the lively old
lady was forced to conduct an unsupported campaign against dressmakers
and milliners.

"It's fortunate, to put it mildly, my dear, that you have me to attend
to such matters," she remarked one day, "or you would most likely have
started on your wedding journey a dowd--and there can be no happy
marriage," she concluded with caustic phil