finished. “And take you back East, maybe, where you belong.”

Suddenly he flung his arms about her again and kissed her upon the lips roughly. “It’s the right thing—the right thing, Beth.” He repeated the words a little bitterly.

She disengaged herself gently.

“You say ‘the right thing,’ Tom,” she returned quietly, “and you mean to be cynical. Because I’ve said that to you sometimes—and—you never quite understood, did you?”

“But why shouldn’t you marry me if we love each other?” he protested again.

He had never understood, of course. And hadn’t he the right to understand?

“I’ll tell you what I meant, Tom—what you have never understood—never realized.” Her face was very earnest, very serious. “You say my stepfather is—is no good. Well, you’re right. He is no good as the world judges those things—and maybe as God judges them, too. But he’s the man my mother loved—there’s no getting away from that, Tom—she loved him; and she died loving him, and with the whisper on her lips telling me to help him and care for him as long as he lived.” She laughed—a curious little laugh that seemed to catch in her throat.

“I never told you that, did I, Tom? I was only fourteen then—but that day, talking there with mother, I thought out my creed—my religion. To do the right thing always. Tom—that’s it—that’s all there is to it. Not the thing that may look best for me at the time or even right for me—but the just thing—the right thing in the eyes of God.”

Her delicate little face grew wistful with the memories the words evoked. She had never spoken to Tom—or to any one—like this before. She had hardly realized until now as she put it into words, how much this simple creed of hers had come to mean to her—how unconsciously she had used it as her guiding star, through all these dreary, mournful years that followed her mother’s death.

She had been unhappy, she knew; and yet not unhappy, either, since happiness came with the knowledge that she was doing the right thing.

And then Tom had come—Tom with his love that had awakened hers, with the promised fulfilment of all her girlish dreams. It was hard for Tom—hard for her, too, when now the right thing made them deny love. But still, she had gone on trusting—hoping, blindly hoping—just waiting for God to work it out in His own way—the way that would be right for them all. And she was sorry now—and a little 

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