“Who is that man?” thundered Beverly, as she crossed the track behind the train.

Patience raised her eyebrows. “What have you to do with my visitors?”

“You sha’n’t receive men, and you sha’n’t sail in my boat.”

“Of course the boat is yours. I shall not use it again.”

“You are my nurse.”

“Your nurse is always ready to be dismissed,” and she walked up the slope, taking no further notice of him.

Hal returned the following week; and, as Beverly improved steadily, the house was filled with company once more. Whenever Patience hinted that she was no longer required, Beverly immediately went to bed and rent the air; but as a matter of fact his attacks were growing less and less frequent.

Patience, in the circumstances, was not impatient to return to work until the hot weather was over. Her position was very pleasant, Hal was ever her loyal friend, and she saw Morgan Steele once a week.

The wood was a wild place on a slope of the bluff some distance above the house. Its underbrush made it unpopular with the guests of Peele Manor. Steele left the train at the regular station a mile up the road and walked back without encounter. In the heart of the dark cool little wood Patience swung two hammocks and filled them with pillows. Steele lay full length in his and looked comfortable and happy, a cigar ever between his lips. Patience, in hers, sat in as dignified an attitude as she could assume.

“Does it make you feel romantic?” he said one day, looking at her quizzically.

“What do you mean?” she asked, flushing a little.

“Oh, I think you have a queer romantic sentimental streak through your modernity—or had. I’ve been wondering if there was any of it left.”

“I never told you.”

“No, but you suggest it. Tell me: didn’t you once have ideals and that sort of thing?”

“I don’t see how you can even guess it, for I have none now.”

“Oh, yes, you have. You won’t when you’re thirty, but you have all sorts of kiddish notions stored away yet in that brain of yours.” He had seen Peele a few days before in the train, and knew the history of their courtship quite as well as if she had related it to him, but he was curious to know what she had been before. He drew her on until she told him the story of the tower and the owl.

That little picture pleased his artistic sense, but when she described her girlish ideals and dreams he threw back his head and laughed loud and long.

“What would I have done with you if I had met you then?” he said, looking with intense amusement at her half angry face. “I should have run, I expect. You are a thousand times more interesting now.”

“Not to myself.”

“Of course not, because you are less of an egoist, and draw a larger measure of your individuality from your environment. But you are real now, where before you were unreal—you were a sort of waxwork with numerous dents. The two extremes in this world are nature and civilisation. Children belong by right to nature, and she holds on to them as long as possible. When civilisation gets hold of them she proceeds to pick out with a pair of tweezers all but the primal passions; and the result is the only human variety capable of enjoying life.”

“Don’t you believe in ideals?” asked Patience, rather wistfully.

“Of course not,” he said contemptuously. “Life is what it is, and you can’t alter it. And as we are only just so big and have only just so many years in which to get over a limited surface of this mighty complication called Life, all we can do is to keep our eyes open, and pick out here and there what appeals to our taste most strongly, swallowing the disagreeable majority as philosophically as possible. When you know the world—and yourself—you can’t have ideals, and the sooner you quit wasting time thinking about them the sooner you begin to enjoy life. And remember that we live but from day to day—we may be a cold cadaver to-morrow. Life is a game of chance. To set up ideals is as purposeless as to waste this life preparing for an impossible next. Omar expressed it better than I can when he said:—

“‘To-morrow? Why, to-morrow I myself may be

With yesterday’s seven thousand years.’”