who will hold
me to the best that is in me, and you can do that, Emily; you have
always done it."

It was a rather touching letter, and she felt its appeal strongly.
Indeed, so stern was her sense of self-sacrifice, that she had an
almost guilty feeling when she thought of Ulrich. If he had not come
into her life at the psychological moment, she might have given herself
to Bruce McKenzie.

But the letter had come too late. Oh, how glad she was that she had
left it in her apron pocket!

She answered it that night.

"I am going to be very frank with you, Bruce, because in being frank
with you I shall be frank with myself. If Ulrich Stoelle had not come
into my life, I should probably have thought I cared for you. Even now
when I am saying 'no,' I realize that your charm has always held me,
and that the prospect of a future by your pleasant fireside holds many
attractions. But since you left Washington, something has happened
which I never expected, and all of my preconceived ideas of myself have
been overturned. Bruce, I am no longer the Emily you have known--a
little staid, gray-haired, with pretty hands, but with nothing else
very pretty about her; a lady who would, perhaps, fill gracefully, a
position for which her aristocratic nose fits her. I am no longer the
Emily of the Toy Shop, wearing spectacles on a black ribbon, eating her
lunches wherever she can get them. No, I am an Emily who is young and
beautiful, a sort of fairy-tale Princess, an Emily who, if she wishes,
shall sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam, but who doesn't wish it
because she hates to sew, and would much rather work in her
silver-bell-and-cockle shell garden--oh, such a wonderful garden as it
is!

"And I am all this, Bruce, I am young and beautiful and all the rest,
because I am seeing myself through the eyes of my lover.

"He is Ulrich Stoelle, as I have said, and you mustn't think because his
name is German that he is to be cast into outer darkness. He is as
American as you with your Scotch blood, or as I with my English blood.
And he is as loyal as any of us. He is too old to be accepted for
service, but he is giving time and money to the cause.

"And he loves me rapturously, radiantly, romantically. He doesn't want
me as a cushion for his tired head, he doesn't want me because he
thinks it would be an act of altruism to provide a haven for me in my
old age, he wants me because he thinks I am the most remarkable woman