This determined, he strenuously began to prepare himself for the change.  Day by day he watched Nella-Rose with new and far-seeing interest—­not always with love and passion-blinded eyes.  He felt that she could, with his devotion and training, develop into a rarely sweet and fine woman.  He was not always a fool in his madness; at times he was wonderfully clear-sighted.  He meant to return home, when once his health was restored, and take the Kendalls into his confidence; but the thought of Lynda gave him a bad moment now and then.  He could not easily depose her from the most sacred memories of his life, but gradually he grew to believe that her relations to him were—­had always been—­platonic; and that she, in the new scheme, would play no small part in his life and Nella-Rose’s.

There would be years of self-denial and labour and then, by and by, success would be achieved.  He would take his finished work, and in this he included Nella-Rose, back to his old haunts and prove his wisdom and good fortune.  In short, Truedale was love-mad—­ready to fling everything to the ruthless winds of passion.  He blindly called things by wrong names and steered straight for the rocks.

He meant well, as God knew; indeed all the religious elements, hitherto unsuspected in him, came to the fore now.  Conventions were absurd when applied to present conditions, but, once having accepted the inevitable, the way was divinely radiant.  He meant to pay the price for what he yearned after.  He had no other intention.

Now that he was resigned to letting the past go, he could afford to revel in the joys of the present with a glad sense of responsibility for the future.

Presently his course seemed so natural that he wondered he had ever questioned it.  More and more men with a vision—­and Truedale devoutly believed he had the vision—­were recognizing the absurdity of old ideals.

Back to the soil meant more than the physical; it meant back to the primitive, the simple, the real.  The artificial exactions of society must be spurned if a new and higher morality were to be established.

If Truedale in this state of mind had once seen the actual danger, all might have been well; but he had swung out of his orbit.

At this juncture Nella-Rose was puzzling her family to the extent of keeping her father phenomenally sober and driving Marg to the verge of nerve exhaustion.

The girl had, to put it in Greyson’s words, “grown up over night.”  She was dazzling and recalled a past that struck deep in the father’s heart.

There had been a time when Peter Greyson, a mere boy, to be sure—­and before the cruel war had wrecked the fortunes of his family—­had been surrounded by such women as Nella-Rose now suggested.  Women with dancing eyes and soft, white hands.  Women born and bred for love and homage, who demanded their privileges with charm and beauty.  There had been one fascinating woman, a great-aunt of Nella-Rose’s,