“David,” said the major as he laid aside the book he had been buried in and began to polish his glasses, “you make no allowances whatever for the artistic temperament.  When a man is making connection with his solar plexus he doesn’t consider the consumption of food of paramount importance.  Now in this treatise of Aristotle—­”

“Well, anyway, I’ve made up my mind to fix up something between him and Caroline Darrah.  He’s got to get a heart interest of his own and let mine alone.  The child is daffy about his poetry and moons at him all the time out of the corners of her eyes, dandy eyes at that; but the old ink-swiller acts as if she wasn’t there at all.  What’ll I do to make him just see her?  Just see her—­see her—­that’ll be enough!”

“David,” said the major quietly as he looked into the fire with his shaggy brows bent over his keen eyes, “the combination of a man heart and a woman heart makes a dangerous explosive at the best, but here are things that make it fatal.  The one you are planning would be deadly.”

“Why, why in the world shouldn’t I touch them off?  Perfectly nice girl, all right man and—­”

“Boy, have you forgotten that I told you of the night Andrew Sevier’s father killed himself; yes, that he had sat the night through at the poker table with Peters Brown?  Brown offered some restoration compromise to the widow but she refused—­you know the struggle that she made and that it killed her.  We both know the grit it took for Andrew to chisel himself into what he is.  The first afternoon he met the girl in here, right by this table, for an instant I was frightened—­only she didn’t know, thank God!  The Almighty gardens His women-things well and fends off influences that shrivel; it behooves men to do the same.”

“So that’s it,” exclaimed Kildare, serious in his dismay.  “Of course I remember it, but I had forgotten to connect up the circumstances.  It’s a mine all right, Major—­and the poor little girl!  She reads his poetry with Phoebe and to me and she admires him and is deferential and—­that girl—­the sweetest thing that ever happened!  I don’t know whether to go over and smash him or to cry on his collar.”

“Dave,” answered the major as he folded his hands and looked off across the housetops glowing in the winter sun, “some snarls in our life-lines only the Almighty can unravel; He just depends on us to keep hands off.  Andrew is a fine product of disastrous circumstances.  A man who can build a bridge, tunnel a mountain and then sit down by a construction camp-fire at night and write a poem and a play, must cut deep lines in life and he’ll not cut them in a woman’s heart—­if he can help it.”

“And she must never know, Major, never,” said David with distress in his happy eyes; “we must see to that.  It ought to be easy to keep.  It was so long ago that nobody remembers it.  But wait—­that is what Mrs. Cherry Lawrence meant when she said to Phoebe in Caroline’s presence that it was just as well under the circumstances that the committee had not asked Andrew to write the poem for the unveiling of the statue.  I wondered at the time why Phoebe dealt her such a knock-out glance that even I staggered.  And she’s given her cold-storage attentions ever since.  Mrs. Cherry rather fancies Andy, I gather.  Would she dare, do you think?”