The hill in front of him dipped to a little stream.  He and Becky had once waded in that stream together.  How white her feet had been on the brown stones.  His life, as he thought of it, was bound up in memories of Becky.  She had come down from school for blissful week-ends and holidays, and she and Randy had tramped over the hills and through the pine woods, finding wild-flowers in the spring, arbutus, flushing to beauty in its hidden bed, blood-root, hepatica, wind-flowers, violets in a purple glory; finding in the summer wild roses, dewberries, blackberries, bees and butterflies, the cool shade of the little groves, the shine and shimmer of the streams; finding in the fall a golden stillness and the redness of Virginia Creeper.  They had ridden on horseback over the clay roads, they had roamed the stubble with a pack of wiry hounds at their heels, they had gathered Christmas greens, they had sung carols, they had watched the Old Year out and the New Year in, and their souls had been knit in a comradeship which had been a very fine thing indeed for a boy like Randy and a girl like Becky.

There had been, too, about their friendship a rather engaging seriousness.  They had talked a great deal of futures.  They had dreamed together very great dreams.  Their dreams had, of course, changed from time to time.  There had been that dream of Becky’s when she first went to the convent, that she wanted some day to be a nun like Sister Loretto.  The fact that it would involve a change of faith was thrashed over flamingly by Randy.  “It is all very well for an old woman, Becky.  But you’d hate it.”

Becky had been sure that she would not hate it.  “You don’t know how lovely she looks in the chapel.”

“Well, there are other ways to look lovely.”

“But it would be nice to be—­good.”

“You are good enough.”

“I am not really, Randy.  Sister Loretto says her prayers all day——­”

“How often do you say yours?”

“Oh, at night.  And in the mornings—­sometimes——­”

“That’s enough for anybody.  If you say them hard enough once, what more can the Lord ask?”

He had been a rather fierce figure as he had flung his questions, but he had not swerved her in the least from her thought of herself as a novice in a white veil, and later as a full-fledged sister, with beads and a black head-dress.

This dream had, in time, been supplanted by one imposed upon her by the ambitions of a much-admired classmate.

“Maude and I are going to be doctors,” Becky had announced as she and Randy had walked over the fields with the hounds at their heels.  “It’s a great opportunity for women, Randy, and we shall study in Philadelphia.”

“Shall you like cutting people up?” he had demanded brutally.

She had shuddered.  “I shan’t have to cut them up very much, shall I?”

“You’ll have to cut them up a lot.  All doctors do, and sometimes they are dead.”