The apartment in which they had lived was on the second floor of a small apartment house. He passed it on the opposite side of the street, looking covertly upward at the windows. There was a light within. She was there, but invisible. Only if she should step near the window could he see her…. Again and again he passed, but she did not appear. Finally he settled himself guiltily in the shadows, where he could watch those windows, and waited—just for that distant sight of her. There was a lamp on the table before the window. Before she retired she would have to come to shut it off…. He waited for that. He would then see her for a second, perhaps.
At last she came, and stood an instant in the window—just a blur, with the light behind her, no feature distinguishable, yet it was her—her. "Ruth…" he whispered, "Ruth…." Then she drew down the shade and extinguished the light.
For a moment he stood there, hands opened as if he would have stretched them out toward her. Then he turned and walked heavily away. He had seen her, but It had not added to his happiness. He had seen her because he must see her…. And by that he knew he must see her again and again and again. He knew it. He knew he would stand there in the shadows on innumerable nights, watching for that one brief second of her presence…. And she loved another man. In a year she would be free to marry Dulac!
He returned to his room and to his book on the ailments of internal-combustion engines; but it was not their diagrams his eyes saw, but only a featureless blur that represented a girl standing in an upper window—-forever beyond his reach….
CHAPTER XXVII
Malcolm Lightener's plant, huge as it was, could not meet the demands of the public for the car he manufactured. Orders outran production. New buildings had been under construction, but before they were completed and equipped their added production was eaten up and the factory was no nearer to keeping supply abreast with demand than it had been in the beginning.
Lightener was forced to make contracts with other firms for parts of his cars. From one plant he contracted for bodies, from another for wheels. He urged Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, to increase their production of axles by ten thousand a year—and still dealers in all parts of the country wrote and telephoned and telegraphed for more cars—more cars.
Hitherto Lightener had made his own engines complete. From outside manufactories he could obtain the other essential parts, but his own production of engines held him back. The only solution for the present was to find some one to make engines to his specifications, and he turned to Bonbright Foote, Incorporated. Whatever might be said of the Foote methods, their antiquity, their lack of modern efficiency, they turned out work whose quality none might challenge—and Malcolm Lightener looked first to quality.
He reached his determination at noon, while he was eating his luncheon, and to Mrs. Lightener's amazement sprang up from the table and lunged out of the room without so much as a glance at her or a word of good-by. In some men of affairs this might not be remarkable, but in Malcolm Lightener it was remarkable. Granite he might be; crude in his manner, perhaps, more dynamic than comfortable, but in all the years of his married life he had never left the house without kissing his wife good-by.
He drove his runabout recklessly to his office, rushed into the engineering department, and snatched certain blue prints and specifications from the files. He knew costs down to the last bolt or washer on the machine he made, and it was the work of minutes only to determine what price he could afford to pay for the engines he wanted.