“You won’t beseech him?”

“No.  He is a man.  He must decide.”

“You won’t tell him what depends on it!”

“Nothing depends on it,” said Mary, calmly.  “Nothing except his own happiness.  I shall find mine in letting him accept his life according to his own free will.”

There was something majestic in her mental attitude.  Wilmer felt how noble her maturity was to be, and told himself, with a thrill of pride, that he had done well to love her.

“Marshby is coming,” he said.  “I want to show you both the picture.”

Mary shook her head.  “Not this morning,” she told him, and he could see how meagre canvas and paint must seem to her after her vision of the body of life.  But he took her hand.

“Come,” he said, gently; “you must.”

Still holding her flowers, she went with him, though her mind abode with her lost cause.  Marshby halted when he saw them coming, and Jerome had time to look at him.  The man held himself wilfully erect, but his face betrayed him.  It was haggard, smitten.  He had not only met defeat; he had accepted it.  Jerome nodded to him and went on before them to the barn.  The picture stood there in a favoring light.  Mary caught her breath sharply, and then all three were silent.  Jerome stood there forgetful of them, his eyes on his completed work, and for the moment he had in it the triumph of one who sees intention, brought to fruitage under perfect auspices.  It meant more to him, that recognition, than any glowing moment of his youth.  The scroll of his life unrolled before him, and he saw his past, as other men acclaimed it, running into the future ready for his hand to make.  A great illumination touched the days to come.  Brilliant in promise, they were yet barren of hope.  For as surely as he had been able to set this seal on Mary’s present, he saw how the thing itself would separate them.  He had painted her ideal of Marshby; but whenever in the future she should nurse the man through the mental sickness bound always to delay his march, she would remember this moment with a pang, as something Jerome had dowered him with, not something he had attained unaided.  Marshby faced them from the canvas, erect, undaunted, a soldier fronting the dawn, expectant of battle, yet with no dread of its event.  He was not in any sense alien to himself.  He dominated, not by crude force, but through the sustained inward strength of him.  It was not youth Jerome had given him.  There was maturity in the face.  It had its lines—­the lines that are the scars of battle; but somehow not one suggested, even to the doubtful mind, a battle lost.  Jerome turned from the picture to the man himself, and had his own surprise.  Marshby was transfigured.  He breathed humility and hope.  He stirred at Wilmer’s motion.

“Am I”—­he glowed—­“could I have looked like that?” Then in the poignancy of the moment he saw how disloyal to the moment it was even to hint at what should have been, without snapping the link now into the welding present.  He straightened himself and spoke brusquely, but to Mary: