to claim so rich a girl?” he answered earnestly. “It seems to me she would know that the boy was father to the man. Her wealth will always be between them. Besides he may have proved a dismal failure.”

“What! He?” Billee looked up indignant. “Why, he just couldn’t fail!”

“Do you really think he is bound to come back to her—when he succeeds.”

“Certainly! Don’t you?”

“I do not! Has she ever seen him again?”

“She thinks she has—once. But he did not know it. She is afraid if she sought him, she would lose him.”

“She understands him, after all, then.”

“But she doesn’t want just him. She wants him to make good. Wants him the same independent boy she remembers. She knows, too, that only in stories do New York heiresses marry poor, unknown young men. Money isn’t everything with them, though. There is something better, but they don’t all find it. A good name means a great name in New York and a great name is better than riches with the rich city girl who is free to choose her husband.”

“What a girl! What a tragedy should he have learned to love another!”

“But he can’t, King! He may not know it, but he can’t escape a love like that. It will pull him from the end of the world. She is just outside his life and her radiance is across his path. Some day she will just step in and he will recognize her. You believe in that. You said so. Love isn’t just an emotion; it’s a power. Even God wouldn’t try to tear it to pieces. He made it and—well, I guess He knows there wouldn’t be any immortality without it.”

King patted Billee’s shoulder.

“Loyal to your ideals, aren’t you? Good! When our ideals perish, the kernel’s out of the shell, the juice out of the grape!

“And such, then, is the story of the little girl whose face is in the window.”

“Yes, but wasn’t it a miracle that Mr. Church, a very ordinary man, I am told, should have dreamed just such a dream, and have guessed those little faces into it?”

“Mr. Church did not dream it,” said King very gently. The girl’s wondering eyes turned slowly toward him.

“What! Who, then?”

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