“So here I am,” she continued. “No doubt you think me silly, too. You are not a mother.”
“I think I understand,” he answered, tenderly. “I think I do.”
They sat in silence for some time, and presently they became aware of a grey light displacing the yellow glow from the lamp and the ruddy reflections of the fire. “It is morning,” said Grant. “I believe the storm has cleared.”
He stood beside her chair and took her hand in his. “Let us watch the dawn break on the mountains,” he said, and together they moved to the windows that overlooked the valley and the grim ranges beyond. Already shafts of crimson light were firing the scattered drift of clouds far overhead....
“Dennison,” she said at length, turning her face to his, “I hope you will understand, but—I have thought it all over. I have not hidden my heart from you. For the boy’s sake, and for your sake, and for the sake of ‘a scrap of paper’—that was what the war was over, wasn’t it?—”
“I know,” he whispered. “I know.”
“Then you have been thinking, too?... I am so glad!” In the growing light he could see the moisture in her bright eyes glisten, and it seemed to him this wild, daring daughter of the hills had never been lovelier than in this moment of confession and of high resolve.
“I am so glad,” she repeated, “for your sake—and for my own. Now, again, you are really the Man-on-the-Hill. We have been in the valley of late. You can go ahead now with your high plans, with your Big Idea. You will marry Miss Bruce, and forget.”
“I shall remember with chastened memory, but I shall never forget,” he said at length. “I shall never forget Zen of the Y.D. And you—what will you do?”
“I have the boy. I did not realize how much I had until to-night. Suddenly it came upon me that he was everything. You won’t understand, Dennison, but as we grow older our hearts wrap up around our children with a love quite different from that which expresses itself in marriage. This love gives—gives—gives, lavishly, unselfishly, asking nothing in return.”