“It won’t be wasted,” he answered. “The land is there. I’ve seen it from afar and it’s a good land, a land where no man shall go hungry. If not I, another shall lead the people into it. I shall have prepared the way.” “I thought you were something,” answered the girl. “I’m an artist. Or, rather, was,” she added after a pause.!

“It wasn’t so incongruous at the time,” he answered. “My father had sent me out to America to superintend a contract. It was the first time I had ever been away from home, though I was nearly thirty; and all my pent-up youth rushed out of me at once. It was a harum-scarum fellow, mad with the joy of life, that made love to her; not the man who went out, nor the man who came back. It was at San Francisco that I met her. She was touring the Western States; and I let everything go to the wind and followed her. It seemed to me that Heaven had opened up to me. I fought a duel in Colorado with a man who had insulted her. The law didn’t run there in those days; and three of his hired gunmen, as they called them, held us up that night in the train and gave her the alternative of going back with them and kissing him or seeing me dead at her feet. I didn’t give her time to answer, nor for them to finish. It seemed a fine death anyhow, that. And I’d have faced Hell itself for the chance of fighting for her. Though she told me afterwards that if I’d died she’d have gone back with them, and killed him.” He was explaining to her things about the air service. It seemed he had had experience in flying—some relation of his with whom he had spent a holiday last summer.

“She’ll only pawn it,” said the girl, “to buy him grapes and port wine.” “I hope nobody saw me,” he said with a laugh. “But I couldn’t bear to leave her there, unhonoured.” Joan’s present lay on the table near to her, as if she had just folded it and placed it there: the little cap and the fine robe of lawn: as if for a king’s child.