But after that, she felt a boundless, warm vigor flow through her, from head to foot. All at once she became so happy, so secure, so thankful for everything, to everybody, that she would have leaped out of the gig into the arms of anybody whatsoever—only to give thanks, because she was so happy, so overwhelmingly happy. She thought she owed all the world so much.
For a presentiment of a great, great boon in store for her came over her; she leaned back as well as she could in the humped-up gig and gave herself up to dreaming.
But it was not the old dreams about the bride and carriages. It was a new dream; great, wonderful, formless, almost dreadful.
Elsie stole a chance to open a couple of buttons in her dress to get at her bodice; it was really too tight.
When they arrived, it was Loppen who felt like telling Madam to hold her tongue, so deep was she in her dreams and so painful was it to be torn out of them.
The foreman’s house lay a little away from the other buildings of the brick-works; and while Madam went in to see her patient, Elsie looked about through the long building, with shelves instead of walls.
Still half in her dream, she walked and looked at all the wonderful things, and everything to-day made a peculiar, unreal impression upon her.
She paid no attention to the workmen, who moved about her, grimy and besmeared with clay; but she was a long time standing and watching the big water-wheel, which drove the clay mills. At the back side of the wheel, as the buckets went over, hundreds and thousands of minute drops of water sprang off; they leaped up in arches, and fell in little, pearly stars, which glittered against the dark wheel as it turned around.
It was cool and refreshing below the water-wheel, and the regular beat of the buckets as they splashed around, and the bright pearls of water dancing before her eyes, ensnared her into new dreams, until some one cried out to her. She stood directly in the way of a giant, who came groaning in from the clay-bank with a heavy load for the tile mills.
Elsie walked in through the long passage-ways where building brick stood piled in rows like psalm-books—high over her head and far, far ahead of her, clear to the end of the passage, where she saw some very little people moving about out in the sunshine.