l out.--Oh! Peter, I love you. I love you."

"I had no idea of that," he said gravely, "but it's wonderful that
you do. I'll put everything I've got into trying to make you happy,
Beulah."

"I know you will, Peter." Her arms closed around his neck and
tightened there. "I love you."

He made her comfortable and she relaxed like a tired child, almost
asleep under his soothing hand, and the quiet spell of his
tenderness.

"I didn't know it could be like this," she whispered.

"But it can," he answered her.

In his heart he was saying, "This is best. I am sure this is best. It
is the right and normal way for her--and for me."

In her tri-cornered dormitory room at the new school which she was not
sharing with any one this year Eleanor, enveloped in a big brown and
yellow wadded bathrobe, was writing a letter to Peter. Her hair hung
in two golden brown braids over her shoulders and her pure profile was
bent intently over the paper. At the moment when Beulah made her
confession of love and closed her eyes against the breast of the man
who had just asked her to marry him, two big tears forced their way
between Eleanor's lids and splashed down upon her letter.

CHAPTER XIX

MOSTLY UNCLE PETER

"Dear Uncle Peter," the letter ran, "I am very, very homesick and
lonely for you to-day. It seems to me that I would gladly give a whole
year of my life just for the privilege of being with you, and talking
instead of writing,--but since that can not be, I am going to try and
write you about the thing that is troubling me. I can't bear it alone
any longer, and still I don't know whether it is the kind of thing
that it is honorable to tell or not. So you see I am very much
troubled and puzzled, and this trouble involves some one else in a way
that it is terrible to think of.

"Uncle Peter, dear, I do not want to be married. Not until I have
grown up, and seen something of the world. You know it is one of my
dearest wishes to be self-supporting, not because I am a Feminist or a
new woman, or have 'the unnatural belief of an antipathy to man' that
you're always talking about, but just because it will prove to me once
and for all that I belong to myself, and that my _soul_ isn't, and
never has been cooperative. You know what I mean by this, and you are
not hurt by my feeling so. You, I am sure, would not want me to be
married, or to have to think of myself as engaged, especially not to
anybody that we all knew and loved