"Yes, Elsie, you. It is as though I had caught sight of a road which was very beautiful and tender, and I was tempted to take it. But it is not my road. What the future has left for me I don't know, but it is not here and I must meet it alone."
He paused for a moment, and the girl's brown eyes filled with tears.
Presently the steady voice continued.
"Destiny is calling, and one cannot take a girl into a battlefield, for that is what it is going to be. I'm a poor man again, Elsie, just as I was seven years ago. That does not matter, for I will be rich in memories."
"Don't," she said brokenly, "don't!"
"Youth will go to youth, Elsie."
"You mean—"
"I mean that the man you really love, is the man you saw run the rapids."
"Jim!" Her eyes were round with terror.
"Yes, Jim, the best friend but one I found in St. Marys. Jim, full of loyalty and courage and energy; Jim who wanted to give his life for mine, though he thought he'd lost you. He had never really lost you, Elsie. The road that led to you seemed so attractive that I hesitated, till now I see that it was Jim's road. It always was."
In the silence that followed she lifted her exquisite face. Her lips were parted, and in her gaze was a light that came as through dissolving mist. And then into their very souls crept the voice of the rapids. Clark caught it, and perceived that the call was not for him alone but for thousands yet unborn, and there began to creep over him the ineffable unction of labor. He realized how large was the world, and how much work yet remained to be done. His spirit was not solitary, but linked forever with eternal realities, and through the cloud that obscured the present he could see his star of destiny shining undimmed.