“Yes,” she answered as she raised her head and looked at him, her eyes shining dark in her white face, “I know I’m a coward—­did you come back to make me go?  I thought they might not miss me until it was too late to come for me.  I didn’t think—­I—­could stand it—­please—­please!”

“You needn’t go at all, dear,” he said as he took the cold hands in his and unclasped the wrung fingers.  “Why didn’t you tell them?  They wouldn’t have insisted on your going.”

“I—­I couldn’t!  I just could not say what I felt to—­to—­them.  I wanted to come—­the statue suggested itself—­for her.  I ought to have given it and gone back—­back to my own life.  I don’t belong—­there is something between them all and me.  They love me and try to make me forget it and—­”

“But, don’t you see, child, that’s just it?  They love you so they hold you against all the other life you have had before.  We’re a strong love people down here—­we claim our own!” A note in his voice brought Andrew to his senses.  He let her hands slip from his and went around the table and sat down opposite to her.  “And so you ran away and hid?” He smiled at her reassuringly.

“Yes.  I knew I ought not to—­then I heard the music and I couldn’t look or listen.  I—­why, where did you come from?  I thought you were in the parade with David.  I felt—­if you knew you would understand.  I wished that I had asked you—­had told you that I couldn’t go.  Did you come back for me?”

“No,” answered Andrew with a prayer in his heart for words to cover facts from the clear eyes fixed on his—­clear, comforted young eyes that looked right down to the rock bed of his soul.  “You see the old boys rather upset me, too.  I have been away so long—­and so many of them are missing.  I’m just a coward, too—­’birds of a feather’—­take me under your wing, will you?”

“I believe one of those ‘strange wild things’ has been flying around in the atmosphere and has taken possession of us again,” said Caroline Darrah slowly, never taking her eyes from his.  “I don’t know why I know, but I do, that you came to comfort me.  I was thinking about you and wishing I could tell you.  Now in just this minute you’ve made me see that I have a right to all of you.  I’m never going to be unhappy about it any more.  After this I’m going to belong as hard as ever I can.”

Something crashed in every vein in Andrew Sevier’s body, lilted in his heart, beat in his throat and sparkled in his eyes.  He sprang to his feet and held out his hand to her.

“Then come on and be adopted,” he said.  “I shall order the electric, and you get into your hat and coat.  We can skirt the park and come in at the side of the Temple back of the platform so that you can slip into place before one-half of the sky-rockets of oratory have been exploded.  Will you come?”

“Will you stay with me—­right by me?” she asked, timidity and courage at war in her voice.