"I want you to meet my other people first."
As they rode at a walk along the little shred of road left to them, the man turned gravely.
"Drennie," he began, "she waited for me, all those years. What I was helped to do by such splendid friends as you and your brother and Wilfred, she was back here trying to do for herself. I told you back there the night before I left that I was afraid to let myself question my feelings toward you. Do you remember?"
She met his eyes, and her own eyes were frankly smiling.
"You were very complimentary, Samson," she told him. "I warned you then that it was the moon talking."
"No," he said firmly, "it was not the moon. I have since then met that fear, and analyzed it. My feeling for you is the best that a man can have, the honest worship of friendship. And," he added, "I have analyzed your feeling for me, too, and, thank God! I have that same friendship from you. Haven't I?"
For a moment, she only nodded; but her eyes were bent on the road ahead of her. The man waited in tense silence. Then, she raised her face, and it was a face that smiled with the serenity of one who has wakened out of a troubled dream.
"You will always have that, Samson, dear," she assured him.
"Have I enough of it, to ask you to do for her what you did for me? To take her and teach her the things she has the right to know?"
"I'd love it," she cried. And then she smiled, as she added: "She will be much easier to teach. She won't be so stupid, and one of the things I shall teach her"—she paused, and added whimsically—"will be to make you cut your hair again."