"A penny for your thoughts," she said lightly.
"I was thinking of you," he answered truthfully.
He looked up as he spoke and his heart leaped at the faint flush that rose slowly over Sophie's face. Indeed all the high resolve that had been shaping in his soul for the past ten minutes came near going by the board. It would have been so easy to imprison the hand that lay along the chair-arm next his own, to utter words that trembled on his tongue, to break through the ice that Sophie used as a shield—for the instant he felt sure of that—and dare what fires burned beneath.
While he stood, poised as it were, upon the tip-toe of indecision, Carr and Tommy Ashe came back.
Afterward, on his way home, Thompson wondered at the swift challenging glance Tommy shot at Sophie in that moment. As if Tommy detected some tensity of feeling that he resented.
CHAPTER XXII
SUNDRY REFLECTIONS
That winter and the summer which followed, and the period which carried him into the spring of 1916, was materially a triumphal procession for Wes Thompson. Tommy's forecast of the war's ending had fallen short as so many other forecasts did. The war went on, developing its own particular horrors as it spread. But the varying tides of war, and the manifold demands of war, bestowed upon Vancouver a heaping measure of prosperity, and Vancouver, in the person of its business men, was rather too far from the sweat and blood of the struggle to be distracted by the issues of that struggle from its own immediate purposes. Business men were in business to make money. They supported the war effort. Every one could not go to the trenches. Workers were as necessary to victory as fighters. People had to be fed and clothed. The army had to be fed and clothed, transported and munitioned. And the fact that the supplying and equipping and transporting was highly profitable to those engaged in such pursuits did not detract from the essentially patriotic and necessary performance of these tasks.