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Rh "I have some things to look after," she said. "Mr. Taylor is in there, or will be shortly. Won't you go in?"

Marcia's thanks was curt. She ran up the steps, breath quickening, and paused with her hand on the knob and watched Helen join Black Joe and move toward the nursery. Then she opened the door and stood looking in.

John was at Helen's desk, loose papers about him, lumber quotations clipped from a Detroit newspaper propped against a book, figuring on a pad of blank paper. He had heard the approach of Helen's noisy car; he had not heard the soft breathing of the big roadster, so when the door opened he believed it was Helen returning and did not look up at once, but only grunted an abstracted greeting. When no step sounded he raised his eyes.

For a moment he sat in motionless amazement, and then his pencil dropped to the blotter.

"Marcia!" he cried, and there was in the word a ring of gladness which was eloquent, as he beheld the trim girl, cool and clean and representative of all that had been desirable—a few short weeks before. "Marcia!" Amazement was there as he rose slowly, bewildered at seeing her there. He stopped about the corner of the desk, moved toward her and stopped. "Marcia?" A faltering question, reflecting all the doubt, a crystallizing of all the change that had come into his heart, a troubled echo of the truth that had come to him last night as he stood alone under the pines.

For a moment they were so, a dozen feet apart, the man's face a study in conflicts, the girl's intent, alert as it pried and probed with the incisiveness of her kind.

"John," she said lowly. "John?"

He moved forward and she put out both hands to him,