The Heart's Kingdom

"Do we want that immortality?" asked Nickols easily. "This world is a

pretty good old place if you don't regard the 'shalt nots,' but isn't it

long enough to live the allotted time? What do we want to do it all

over again for, that is, provided we do all the pleasant things while we

have the chance? I don't want to see any play twice, even a masterpiece.

I wouldn't want to live again unless I had been a Christian in this life

and felt that I wanted to come back and do a lot of the things I had

just heard about and previously hadn't tried."

"Certainly I wouldn't want another life that is as unsatisfied as this,"

I murmured, more to myself than to Nickols.

"Do the things that satisfy," he urged again, and I could see a deviltry

dancing at me out of the corner of his eyes that I resented deeply

without exactly knowing why.

"Harriet Henderson can't get Mark Morgan's love or--his children, and

Nell Morgan is unattainable for Billy. Though they have all the world's

goods and go a pace that pleases them, they are unsatisfied. If they

don't get the new deal that immortality promises they lose the whole

thing," I answered straight out from the shoulder. "And what about those

who die in infancy and--and you and me?"

"If you'll just kiss me and hush preaching to me I'll be entirely

satisfied and ready to die as soon as I have lifted that fifty thousand

out of old Jeffries with the judge's and the Reverend Gregory's garden

and done a few more commissions. Try kissing me and see if you don't

feel more cheerful," Nickols answered with a laugh, as he drew me close

to him. I sadly shut up the doors of my depths, warded off the

kiss--why, I didn't know--and persuaded him to go up to his rooms which

I had seen Sallie and Dabney put in order that afternoon.

It was midnight when I parted with Nickols at the head of the old

winding stairs in the fragrant darkness, lit only by the silver light of

the night from a long window at the front of the hall. He held me close

for a half second as he whispered: "Let me make you happy. I understand."

"I don't understand, and until I do I'd make you miserable, dear," I

whispered back as I drew myself out of his reluctant arms and went into

my own door.

Then for a long midnight hour I stood at my deep window and looked out

over the garden, past the squat steeple silvering beyond the lilac

hedge, to Paradise Ridge in the dim distance, and tried to read my own

hieroglyphics. I needed help. Nickols had come after me to Goodloets in

a spirit of gentle determination and I knew the fight would be to the

finish. And why should I fight? Any woman ought to be proud to marry

Nickols Morris Powers, especially a woman who had loved him since her

heart had been developed to the knowledge of love. Very unostentatiously

and with perfect good taste Nickols had let me see that Marie VanClive

with her Knickerbocker ancestry and her Manhattan land-grants fortune

was very decidedly interested in him in her cultured and perfected young

way, and young Mrs. Houston had herself shown me the same thing on one

of the week-end flights we had had on her yacht. And beyond all that my

own heart told me that Nickols was desirable. His gentleness and his

tenderness and his daring and his humor were irresistible to a woman.

And his lazy acquiescence in life was peaceful and inviting to my own

strenuosity. I felt as if I had always been an eagle breasting the gale

with no place to alight, and now Nickols was calling to me from an

eyrie on a mountain side to come and rest and be mated and comforted.