betrayed him. It was haggard, smitten. He had not only met defeat; he
had accepted it. Jerome nodded to him and went on before them to the
barn. The picture stood there in a favoring light. Mary caught her
breath sharply, and then all three were silent. Jerome stood there
forgetful of them, his eyes on his completed work, and for the moment he
had in it the triumph of one who sees intention, brought to fruitage
under perfect auspices. It meant more to him, that recognition, than any
glowing moment of his youth. The scroll of his life unrolled before him,
and he saw his past, as other men acclaimed it, running into the future
ready for his hand to make. A great illumination touched the days to
come. Brilliant in promise, they were yet barren of hope. For as surely
as he had been able to set this seal on Mary's present, he saw how the
thing itself would separate them. He had painted her ideal of Marshby;
but whenever in the future she should nurse the man through the mental
sickness bound always to delay his march, she would remember this moment
with a pang, as something Jerome had dowered him with, not something he
had attained unaided. Marshby faced them from the canvas, erect,
undaunted, a soldier fronting the dawn, expectant of battle, yet with no
dread of its event. He was not in any sense alien to himself. He
dominated, not by crude force, but through the sustained inward strength
of him. It was not youth Jerome had given him. There was maturity in the
face. It had its lines--the lines that are the scars of battle; but
somehow not one suggested, even to the doubtful mind, a battle lost.
Jerome turned from the picture to the man himself, and had his own
surprise. Marshby was transfigured. He breathed humility and hope. He
stirred at Wilmer's motion.

"Am I"--he glowed--"could I have looked like that?" Then in the
poignancy of the moment he saw how disloyal to the moment it was even to
hint at what should have been, without snapping the link now into the