en had
brought their boat in, for Barry had grown tired of the sport. He
wanted to talk about himself.

"It's no use," he said again; "it's in the blood."

Roger was propped against a tree, his hat off, his dark hair blown back
from his fine thin face.

"Our lives," he said, "are our own. Not what our ancestors make them."

"I don't believe it," Barry said, flatly. "I've fought a good fight,
no one can say that I haven't. And I've lost. After this do you
suppose that Mary will let me marry Leila? Do you suppose the General
will let me marry her?"

"Will you let yourself marry her?"

Barry's face flamed. "Then you think I'm not worthy?"

"It is what you think, Ballard, not what I think."

Barry pulled up a handful of grass and threw it away, pulled up another
handful and threw it away. Then he said, doggedly, "I'm going to marry
her, Poole; no one shall take her away from me."

"And you call that love?"

"Yes. I can't live without her."

Roger with his eyes on the dark water which slipped by the banks,
taking its shadows from the darkness of the thick branches which bent
above it said quietly, "Love to me has always seemed something bigger
than that--it has seemed as if love--great love took into consideration
first the welfare of the beloved."

There was a long silence, out of which Barry said tempestuously, "It
will break her heart if anything comes between us. I'm not saying that
because am a conceited donkey. But she is such a constant little
thing."

Roger nodded. "That's all the more reason why you've got to pull up
now, Ballard."

"But I've tried."

"I knew a man who tried--and won."

"How?" eagerly.

"I met him in the pine woods of the South. I was down there to recover
from a cataclysm which had changed--my life. This man had a little
shack next to mine. Neither of us had much money. We lived literally
in the open. We cooked over fires in front of our doors. We hunted
and fished. Now and then we went to town for our supplies, but most of
our things we got from the schooner-men who drove down from the hills.
My neighbor was married. He had a wife and three children. But he had
come alone. And he told me grimly that he should never go back until
he went back a man."

"Did he go back?"

"Yes. He conquered. He looked upon his weakness not merely as a moral
disease, but as a physical one. And it was to be cured like any other
disease by removing the cause. The firs