blooming old cynic! You poor old he-Cassandra! Where did you get
all your wisdom? Just wait until you find some one--"

"Huh! I have found her. Or rather she's found me. I could let her make
a fool of me. But I won't. A long life and my own life for me. I'm
wearing a sign, 'Nothing doing!' You'd better get one just like it."

David roared again.

"All right, laugh!" growled Dick. "Rope, tie and brand yourself. And
then some of these days when you're one woman's property and you find the
other woman is just around the corner waiting-- That's another thing,
Davy."

But David turned his back on the counselor and fled. What did Dick know
about it?

The dream was being realized, the lonely gaps filled. He was to have
some one of his own to love and to serve. This time his heart was a
captive for life; any one who had been in love a baker's dozen of times
could tell that. He expected great things of love. He saw it as
something exquisitely fine and beautiful and yet proof against the vandal
fingers of familiarity; a joy always, a light for the dark places, a
guide and comrade in stressful times; and everlasting as the hills. Just
as the poets have always sung of it. Would any man wear a sign, "Nothing
doing!" in the face of that?

The last afternoon of Shirley's visit came, clear and crisp, a strong
west wind lifting the haze from the tinted hills. They pretended to play
golf, but their strokes were perfunctory, absent-minded. They talked
little and that in strangely low tones, always soberly. After a while
they gave up the pretense, sought a seat on a secluded sunny slope and
fell into a long silence.

"Shirley!" he broke it at length.

"Yes, David?"

"I'll hate to see you go back."

"I know. I'll hate to go, too."

"It--hurts me to think of your going back to work."

"Oh, I'm used to it." She smiled. A world of sweet courage was in that
smile.

"Shirley--_dear_!"

She raised her eyes to his.

"A poor man--I suppose he's a coward to ask a woman to share-- But it
wouldn't be for always. You believe that, don't you?"

"I believe that."

"I'd try to make up for the lack of money with other things--worth more
than money maybe. Are you willing to be poor with me for a while?"

"Yes, David."

He sat very still. His face went white. A happiness, so intense that it
hurt, flooded his being.

"You really--mean that?" he whispered.

Tears of tenderness stood in her eyes. She