out the place, which was stamped with his father's fine and
kindly personality,--like a stick suddenly swept out of the current of
the main stream into a tideless backwater, untouched by the sun? And
when finally, still deaf to the call of spring, his father's message of
courage, "We count it death to falter, not to die," rang out and
straightened him up and set him on the rails of action once again, it
was not quite the same Martin Gray who uttered the silent cry for
companionship that found an answer in Joan's lonely and rebellious
heart. Sorrow had strengthened him. Out of the silent manliness of
grief he went out again on the great main road with a wistful desire to
love and be loved, to find some one with whom to link an arm in an
empty world all crowded with strangers--and there stood Joan.

It was natural that he should believe, under those circumstances, that
he and she did not meet by mere accident, that they had been brought
together by design--all the more natural when he listened to her story
of mental and physical imprisonment and came to see, during their daily
stolen meetings, that he was as necessary to her as she was to him.
Every time he left her and watched her run back to that old house of
old people, it was borne in upon him more definitely that he was
appointed in the cosmic scheme to rescue Joan from her peculiar cage
and help her to try her wings. All about that young fresh, eager
creature whose eyes were always turned so ardently toward the city, his
imagination and superstition built a bower of love.

He had never met a girl in any way like her--one who wanted so much and
would give so little in return for it, who had an eel-like way of
dodging hard-and-fast facts and who had made up her mind with all the
zest and thoughtlessness of youth to mold life, when finally she could
prove how much alive she was, into no other shape than the one which
most appealed to her. She surprised and delighted him with her quick
mental turns and twists, and although she sometimes made him catch his
breath at her astoundingly frank expression of individualism, he told
himself that she was still in the chrysalis stage and could only get a
true and normal hang of things after rubbing shoulders with what she
called life with a capital L.

Two weeks slipped away more quickly than these two young things had
ever known them to go, and the daily meetings, utterly guileless and
free from flirtation, were the best part o