"You'll never have the chance to laugh twice, and this one is such a sky-scraper it would astonish you." When she spoke, she was thinking of that moment on the stair, under the amber window, when through the music she heard the king's call, and was first awakened to the knowledge that a high destiny awaited her.

What it was to be was still unrevealed to her, but of the voice and the vision she had no doubt.

Whatever it was she was sure it would be higher and greater than anything any one she knew aspired to.

Yet somehow, sitting there in the friendly shadows, with the firelight shining on the earnest manly face opposite, she did not care so much about a Joan of Arc career as she had.

It would be glorious, of course, but it might be lonesome.
People on pedestals were shut off from dear delightful intimacies like this.
And then those lines began running through her head that she had not been able to get rid of, since the morning she read them in the magazine: "For if he come not by the road, and come not by the hill, And come not by the far seaway--" She wished that she was certain that she could add that last part of the line, "_Yet come he surely will!_" Just then, to have one strong true face bending towards hers in the firelight, with a devotion all for her, seemed worth a lifetime of public plaudits, and having one's name handed down to posterity on monoliths and statues.
"For if he come not by the road, and come not by the hill, And come not by the far seaway--" "Yes, it certainly would be lonesome," she decided.