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Mr. Thorne heaved a sigh, and changed his feet on the gritty tent floor. He stooped and picked up some small object on which he had stepped, a collar-stud trodden flat. He rolled it in his fingers musingly.

“She may be getting up her courage to tell him in her own time and way.”

“The time has gone by when she could have told him honorably. She should have stopped the very first word on his lips.”

“She couldn’t do that, you know, and be human. She couldn’t be expected to spare him at such a cost as that. Mighty few men would be worth it.”

“If he wasn’t worth it she could have let him go. And the family! Think of their accepting his proposal in silence. Why, can they even be married, Henry, without some process of law?”

“Heaven knows! I don’t know how far the other thing had gone–far enough to make questions awkward.”

Husband and wife remained seated side by side on the son’s deserted bed. The shape of each was disconsolately outlined to the other against the tent’s illumined walls. Now a wind-swayed branch of manzanita rasped the canvas, and cast upon it shadows of its moving leaves.

“It’s pretty rough on quiet old folks like us, with no money to get us into trouble,” said Mr. Thorne. “The boy is not a beauty, he’s not a swell. He is just a plain, honest boy with a good working education. If you judge a woman, as some say you can, by her choice of men, she shouldn’t be very far out of the way.”

“It is very certain you cannot judge a man by his choice of women.”

“You cannot judge a boy by the women that get hold of him. But Willy is not such a babe as you think. He’s a deuced quiet sort, but he’s not been knocking around by himself these ten years, at school and college and vacations, without picking up an idea or two–possibly about women. Experience, I grant, be probably lacks; but he has the true-bred instinct. We always have trusted him so far; I’m willing to trust him now. If there are things he ought to know about this woman, leave him to find them out for himself.”

“After he has married her! And you don’t even know whether a marriage is possible without some sort of shuffling or concealment; do you?”

“I don’t, but they probably do. Her family aren’t going to get themselves into that kind of a scrape.”

“I have no opinion whatever of the family. I think they would accept any kind of a compromise that money can buy.”

“Very likely, and so would we if we had a daughter”–

“Why, we have a daughter! It is our daughter, all the daughter we shall ever call ours, that you are talking about. And to think of the girls and girls he might have had! Lovely girls, without a flaw–a flaw! She will fall to pieces in his hand. She is like a broken vase put together and set on the shelf to look at.”

“Now we are losing our sense of proportion. We must sleep on this, or it will blot out the whole universe for us.”

“It has already for me. I haven’t a shadow of faith in anything left.”

“And I haven’t read the paper. Suppose the boy were in Cuba now!”

“I wish he were! It is a judgment on me for wanting to save him up, for insisting that the call was not for him.”

“That’s just it, you see. You have to trust a man to know his own call. Whether it’s love or war, he is the one who has got to answer.”

“But you will write to him to-morrow, Henry? He must be saved, if the truth can save him. Think of the awakening!”

“My dear, if he loves her there will be no awakening. If there is, he will have to take his dose like other men. There is nothing in the truth that can save him, though I agree with you that he ought to know it–from her.”