“Perhaps some day you’ll pass us again along the road to your Providence,” said Rose Mary gently, and the wistful question was all that her woman’s tradition allowed her to ask—­though her heart break with its pride.

“Some day,” answered Everett, and underneath the quiet voice sounded a savage note and his teeth bit through his cigar, which he threw out into the dew-carpeted grass.  Just then there came from up under the eaves a soft disturbed flutter of wings and a gentle dove note was answered reassuringly and tenderly in kind.

“Rose Mary,” he said as he turned to her and laid his hand on the step near her, “once you materialized your heart for me, and now I’m going to do the same for mine to you.  Yours, you say, is an old gabled, vine-clad, dove-nested country house, a shelter for the people you love—­and always kept for your Master’s use.  It is something just to have had a man’s road to Providence lead past the garden gate.  I make acknowledgement.  And mine?  I think it is like one of those squat, heathen, Satsuma vases, inlaid with distorted figures and symbols and toned in all luridness of color, into which has been tossed a poor sort of flower plucked from any bush the owner happened to pass, which has been salted down in frivolity—­or perhaps something stronger.  I’ll keep the lid on to-night, for you wouldn’t like the—­perfume.”

“If you’d let me have it an hour I would take it down to the milk-house and empty and scrub it and then I could use it to pour sweet cream into.  Couldn’t you—­you leave it here—­in Uncle Tucker’s care?  I—­I—­really—­I need it badly.”  The raillery in her voice was as delicious and daring as that of any accomplished world woman out over the Ridge.  It fairly staggered Everett with its audacity.

“No,” he answered, coolly disapproving, “no, I’ll not leave it; you might break it.”

“I never break the crocks—­I can’t afford to.  And women never break men’s hearts; they do it themselves by keeping a hand on the treasure so as to take it back when they want it, and so between them both it sometimes gets—­shattered.”

“Very well, then—­the lid’s off to you—­and remember you asked for—­the rummage, Rose Mary,” answered Everett in a tone as light as hers.  Then suddenly he rose and stood tall and straight in front of her, looking down into her upraised eyes in the dusk.  “You don’t know, do you, you rose woman you, what a man’s life can hold—­of nothingness?  Yes, I’ve worked hard at my profession and thrown away the proceeds—­in a kind of—­riotous living.  Other men’s vast fortunes have been built on my brains, and my next year I’m going to enter as a penniless thirty-niner.  When I came South three months ago I drew the last thousand dollars I had in bank, I have a couple of hundreds left, and that’s all, out of over twenty thousand made in straight fees from mineral tests in the last year.  Yes—­a bit of riotous living.  It’s true about those poor flowers plucked off