“I don’t blame you for feeling that way,” he said gently.  “When I first came out I did think I’d play a lone hand.  I was hard and bitter and defiant.  But when I met you-all again—­and found you were just like home folks—­all of you so kind and good, far beyond any claims I had on you—­why, Miss Joyce, my heart went out to my old friends with a rush.  It sure did.  Maybe I had to be stiff to keep from being mushy.”

“Oh, if that’s it!” Her eager face, flushed and tender, nodded approval.

“But you’ve got to look at this my way too,” he urged.  “I can’t repay your father’s kindness—­yes, and yours too—­by letting folks couple your name, even in friendship, with a man who—­”

She turned on him, glowing with color.  “Now that’s absurd, Dave Sanders.  I’m not a—­a nice little china doll.  I’m a flesh-and-blood girl.  And I’m not a statue on a pedestal.  I’ve got to live just like other people.  The trouble with you is that you want to be generous, but you don’t want to give other folks a chance to be.  Let’s stop this foolishness and be sure-enough friends—­Dave.”

He took her outstretched hand in his brown palm, smiling down at her.  “All right.  I know when I’m beaten.”

She beamed.  “That’s the first honest-to-goodness smile I’ve seen on your face since you came back.”

“I’ve got millions of ’em in my system,” he promised.  “I’ve been hoarding them up for years.”

“Don’t hoard them any more.  Spend them,” she urged.

“I’ll take that prescription, Doctor Joyce.”  And he spent one as evidence of good faith.

The soft and shining oval of her face rippled with gladness as a mountain lake sparkles with sunshine in a light summer breeze.  “I’ve found again that Dave boy I lost,” she told him.

“You won’t lose him again,” he answered, pushing into the hinterland of his mind the reflection that a man cannot change the color of his thinking in an hour.

“We thought he’d gone away for good.  I’m so glad he hasn’t.”

“No.  He’s been here all the time, but he’s been obeying the orders of a man who told him he had no business to be alive.”

He looked at her with deep, inscrutable eyes.  As a boy he had been shy but impulsive.  The fires of discipline had given him remarkable self-restraint.  She could not tell he was finding in her face the quality to inspire in a painter a great picture, the expression of that brave young faith which made her a touchstone to find the gold in his soul.

Yet in his gravity was something that disturbed her blood.  Was she fanning to flame banked fires better dormant?

She felt a compunction for what she had done.  Maybe she had been unwomanly.  It is a penalty impulsive people have to pay that later they must consider whether they have been bold and presumptuous.  Her spirits began to droop when she should logically have been celebrating her success.