I had planned to be back in the city by noon the next day. But there was something that I wanted to do before I left Katytown. I wanted to go into the little grove which, far more than the up-stairs place where I slept, had always seemed to me to be "my room." I went there after our early breakfast. The place was considerably thinned, but it was still sanctuary.

When I reached the fence by the road, I went over it in the old way. As I went, I was conscious that some one, somewhere, was singing. As I struck into the road, the low humming which I had heard was mounting. And then it lifted suddenly into the words of its song. The man who was singing it had just passed, and he had his face set from me. But I knew him, as I knew his song. Then the time and the hour swept over me, and I sang with him:

He wheeled, and stood still in the road and let me come to him. And the song broke off, and he was saying:

"Cosma! Cosma Wakely! I've come to scold you!"

"It was such fun!" I pleaded.

"But so to take in a near-sighted old gentleman who goes out of his mind trying to remember any of the thousand faces he sees in a year of lectures—ah, it was too bad. Why didn't you tell me?"

"I was trying to get made over," I said. "And I'm not made over yet. You had no right to find me out! How did you find me out?"

"I went to that gallery," he explained, "yesterday. And there I saw Gerald Massy's portrait of you—and underneath he has, you know, set 'Cosma.' I have never forgotten that name—how could I? So I came galloping home to accuse you. And there sat Mrs. Carney calling you 'Cosma,' before my eyes. What I can't understand," he ended savagely, "is how I can have been so dumb. Now, tell me—tell me!"

We were walking in the road, which had somehow assumed a docile and appeased look, like something which we were stroking as it was meant to be stroked. And I told him the rest, beginning with the hour that he had left me in Twiney's pasture. And so we came to Twiney's pasture again.

We broke through the wet sedge, and went over the fence as we had gone that other morning. And presently we stood at the top of the hill from which he had first shown me the whole world.

Then I did my best to tell him. "Mr. Ember!" I said, "all the little bit I've been able to make out of myself, you've made. I want to tell you that—and I'm not telling it at all!" I cried.

He stood as he had stood before, with the sky's great blue behind him. And he said:

"Then just don't bother with it. Besides, I've something far more important to try to say to you—the best I know how. Cosma—will you marry me?"

In those first days, I had sometimes dreamed of his saying that—dreamed it hopelessly; but sometimes, too, I had sunk warm in the thought of it, as if there all thought had come home. Yet now, when he actually said it, it came to me with a great shock. And out of the fulness of what I suddenly read in my heart, I answered him:

"Why, I can't marry you," I said. "I can't give up my work with you!"

He looked down at me gravely, and he made me the answer of all men.

"Give up the work! But the work together is one of the reasons why I love you."

"I can see that," I said. "And the work together is one of the reasons I love you. But——"

He put out his arms then, and took me.

"You said you loved me!" he said.

"I do," I said, "why of course I do——"

And when he kissed me it was as if nothing new had happened, but only something which was already ours.

"Then what is it," he asked, "but you for me, and me for you?"

And I cried, "Oh, don't you see? That after being what I've been to you—knowing your work and your thought—I can't stop it and be just your wife? I can't exchange this for looking after your house and ordering your food, and sending off the laundry and keeping your clothes mended?"

"But, my child——" he began.

"I know what you mean," I told him, "you think it wouldn't be that way. You think we'd go on as we are. We wouldn't—we wouldn't. All those things have to be done—I'd be the one to do them. It would be I who would begin to play myself false, I who would begin to do all the little housewifely things that other women do. It would get me—it would eat up my time and my real work with you—I tell you it would get me in the end! It gets every woman!"

"Well," he said again, "what then?"

I saw his eyes, understanding, humorous, tender. "Don't!" I cried; "it's almost got me now—when you look at me like that."

"Well," he said again, "what then?"

"Oh, don't you see?" I cried, "I've got myself to fight. I care now for big issues—for life and death and the workers—for the future more than for now. We are working for them—you and I. I will not let myself care only for getting your food and keeping the house tidy!"

He looked away over the fields, and by his eyes I thought that now I had lost him for good and all. But he only said:

"To think what we have done to love—all of us. Of course I know that the possibility is exactly what you say it is."

"Not the possibility," I said, "the inevitability. Look at all of them down there—Mother, Lena, Luke's mother, every woman in Katytown—and most of them everywhere else. They're all prostituted to housework. Don't let me do it! You've saved me this far—you've helped me to be the little that I've made of myself. Now help me! And," I added, "you'll have to help me. For I want to do it!"

He put out his hand, not like a lover, but like a comrade. And when I gave him mine, he shook it, like a friend.

"I will help you," he said. "Here's my hand on it. And it strikes me that this is about the most poignant appeal that a woman can make to a man. To his chivalry, if you like!"

And then I said the rest: "And you must see—I'm not a mother-woman. I should love children—to have them, to give them every free chance to grow. But it would be the same with them: their sewing, their mending, a good deal of the care of them—I don't know about it, and I shouldn't like it. I shouldn't be wise about their feeding, or the care of them if they were sick. And as for saying that the knowledge comes with the physical birth of the child, that's sheer nonsense."

"Oh, utter nonsense," he agreed. "Yes, I know you're not a 'mother-woman,' in the sense that means a nurse. Many women are not who are afraid to acknowledge it. But you'd give strength and health to your children—you're fitted to bring them into the world—you'd love them, and all children."

And this was thrillingly true for me. "What I really want to do," I said, "is to help make the world a home for all children—to make life—and their birth—normal and healthful and right, my own children included."

"You're the new factor that we've got to deal with, Cosma," he said, "the mother-to-the-race woman. A woman whose passion for the children of the race isn't necessarily to be confused with a passion for keeping their ears clean. It's something that we've all got to work out together...." He broke off, and cried out to me, "Cosma! Are you willing that we shall let this beat us?"

I looked up at him.

"It's something that has to be worked out," he repeated. "All that you've been saying—it's got to be worked out for all women. Well, it's not going to be done by every woman funking it, and staying unmarried."

He put his hands on my shoulders and looked into my eyes.

"Are you sure," he said, "that I understand? That from the bottom of my heart I know and feel what you've been saying? And that I'll do the best I can to help you work it out?"

"Yes," I said, "I'm sure of that."

I was intensely sure of him—sure that we looked at life with the same love for the same kind of living.

"Will you come?" he cried. "Will you come and face it with me? And do your best, somehow, to work it out with me?"

"Will you come and face it with me?"

His arms drew me, and in them was home. And for my life I could not have told whether I went to meet his challenge, or whether I went because we were each other's in the ancient way.