pretense, or reproach;--only confidence and love.

He spoke slowly, as if feeling for words: "I have been in Hell; and
you--you have brought me out. Why did you do it?"

"Because you are mine," she answered, with her low chuckling laugh. It
was so good to have him able to talk to her rationally after those long
hours of fighting.

"Because I am yours?" he repeated, puzzling over her words.

"Yes," she returned, with a hint of determined proprietorship in her
voice; "because you belong to me. You see, that eddy where your boat
landed is my property, and so anything that drifts down the river and
lodges there belongs to me. Whatever the river brings to me, is mine.
The river brought you, and so--" She finished with another laugh,--a
laugh that was filled with tender mother-yearning.

The blue eyes smiled back at her for a moment; then she saw them darken
with painful memories.

"Oh, yes; the river," he said. "I wanted the river to do something for
me, and--and it did something quite different from what I wanted."

"Of course," she returned, eagerly, "the river is always like that. It
always does the thing you don't expect it to do. Just like life itself.
Don't you see? It begins somewhere away off at some little spring, and
just keeps going and going and going; and thousands and thousands of
other springs, scattered all over the country, start streams and creeks
and branches that run into it, and make it bigger and bigger, as it