uld be of some use in the world. What's
more wonderful still, you make me feel as if I had been of use all these
years when I've felt so useless."

It was in the stress of the sensation of having wandered into far,
exotic regions in which his feet could only stray that he said, simply,
"You're home to me."

She was so near to bursting into tears that she turned from him sharply
and walked up the hill. He followed slowly, swinging the empty basket.
Her buoyant step on the snow, over which the frost had drawn the
thinnest of shining crusts, gave a nymphlike smoothness to her motion.

Having reached the treeless ridge, she emerged on that high altar on
which, not twenty-four hours earlier, he had sunk face downward in the
snow. The snow had drifted again over his footprints and the mark of his
form. It was drifting still, in little powdery whirls, across a surface
that caught tints of crimson and glints of fire from an angry sunset. It
was windy here. As she stood above him, facing the north, her figure
poised against a glowering sky, her garments blew backward. Even when he
reached her and was standing by her side, she continued to gaze outward
across the undulating, snow-covered country, in the folds of which an
occasional farm-house lamp shone like a pale twilight star.

"You see, it's this way," he pursued, as though there had been no
interruption. "When I'm with you I seem to get back to my natural
conditions--the conditions in which I can live and work. That's what I
mean by your being home to me. Other places"--he ventured this much of
the confession he had at heart--"other places have their temptations;
but it's only at home that one lives."

He took courage to go on from the way in which her gloved hand stole
into his. "I dare say you think I talk too much about work; but, after
all, we can't forget that we live in a country in the making, can we? In
a way, it's a world in the making. There's everything to do--and I want
to be doing some of it, Lois," he declared, with a little outburst. "I
can't help it. I know some people think I'm an enthusiast, and others
put me down as a prig--but I can't help it."

"I know you can't, Thor, and I can't tell you how much I--I"--she felt
for the right word--"I admire it."

He turned to her eagerly. "You're the only one, Lois, who knows what I
mean--who can speak my language. You want to be useful, too."

"And I never have been."

"Nor I. I've known that things were to