ent correct in his estimate of her, but she shrank from
the direct personal application of his remarks.

"Aren't the virtues you have described fairly common?" she asked. "I
think that must be so, because they're so necessary."

"In a degree, I suppose they are. You see them, perhaps, most clearly in
such lands as mine. The pioneer has a good deal against him--frost and
floods, hard rock and sliding snow; he must face every discomfort, hunger
and stinging cold. The prospector crawls through tangled forests, and
packs his stores across snowy divides; shallow shafts cave in, rude dams
are swept away. A man worked to exhaustion on the trail runs out of
provisions and goes on, starving; he lames himself among the rocks, sets
his teeth and limps ahead. I've thought the capacity to do so is
humanity's greatest attribute, but after all it's not shown in its finest
light battling with material things. When the moral stress comes, the man
who would face the other often fails."

"Yes," she asserted; "there are barriers that can't be stormed. Merely to
acquiesce is the hardest thing of all, but in that lies the victory."

"It's a bitter one," he answered moodily.

There was silence for a few minutes while they strolled on through the
heather. Afterward, Millicent understood where his thoughts had led, but
now she was chiefly conscious of a slight but perplexing resentment
against the fact that he should discourse rather crude philosophy.
Indeed, the feeling almost amounted to disappointment--it was their last
walk, and though she did not know what she had expected from him, it was
something different from this. Walking by her side, with his fine poise,
his keen eyes that regarded her steadily when she spoke, and his resolute
brown face, he appealed to her physically, and in other ways she approved
of him. It was borne in upon her more clearly that she would miss him
badly, and she suspected that he would not find it easy to part from her.
In the meanwhile he recognized that she had, no doubt unconsciously,
given him a hint--when the moral difficulties were unsurmountable one
must quietly submit.

They stopped when they reached the highest strip of moor. The sun was
low, the vast sweep of country beneath them was fading to neutral color,
woods, low ridges, and river valleys losing their sharpness of contour as
the light left them. A faint cold wind sighed among the heather,
emphasizing the desolation of the moorland.

Millic