“And I have always believed that I owed my life to you—­and Hector!” she said reproachfully.

“You owe me much more than that,” he affirmed broadly, when they had sat down to rest—­they had often to do this, lest the way should prove shorter than the happy afternoon—­on the end of the bridge log.

“Money?”—­flippantly.

“No; love.  If it hadn’t been for me, you might never have known what love is.”

His saying it was only an upbubbling of love’s audacity, but she chose to take it seriously.  She was gazing afar into the depths of the fresh-green forest darkening softly to the sunset, with her hands clasped around the tangle of late-blooming white azaleas in her lap.

“It is a high gift,” she said soberly; “the highest of all for a woman.  Once I thought I should live and die without knowing it, as many women do.  I wish I might give you something as great.”

“I am already overpaid,” he asserted.  “For a man there is nothing so great, no influence so nearly omnipotent, as the love of a good woman.  It is the lever that moves the world—­what little it does move—­up the hill to the high planes.”

“A lever?” she mused; “yes, perhaps.  But levers are only links in the chain binding cause to effect.”

His smile was lovingly tolerant.

“Is that what your religion has brought you to, Ardea—­a full-grown belief in a Providence that takes cognizance of our little ant-wanderings up and down the human runways?”

“Yes, I think so,” she said; but she said it without hesitancy or a shadow of doubt.

“I’m glad; glad you have attained,” he rejoined quite unaffectedly.

“It was hardly attainment, in my case,” she qualified; and, after a momentary pause, she added:  “any more than it was in yours.”

“You think I, too, have attained?” he smiled.  “I am not so sure of that.  Sometimes I think I am like my father, who is like Mahomet’s coffin; hanging somewhere between Heaven and earth, unable to climb to one or to fall to the other.  But I’m not as brash as I was a year or so ago; at least, I’m not so cock-sure that I know it all.  That evening in the music-room at Deer Trace changed me—­changed my point of view.  You haven’t heard me rail once at the world, or at the hypocrites in it, since I came home, have you?”

“No.”

“Well, I don’t feel like railing.  I reckon the old world is good enough to live in—­to work in; and certainly there are men in it who are better than I’m ever likely to be.  I met one of them last winter out in the Carriso cow country; a ‘Protestant’ priest, he called himself, of your persuasion.  He was the most hopeless bigot I’ve ever known, and by long odds the nearest masculine approach to true, gritty saintliness.  There was nothing he wouldn’t do, no hardship he wouldn’t cheerfully undergo, to brother a man who was down, and the wickedest devil in all that God-forsaken country swore by him.  Yet he would argue with me by the hour, splitting hairs over Apostolic Succession, or something of that sort.”