Creyton had watched the play of life in its local relation to George with an amused interest, and when the Meanness-of-Small-Things was sitting on the stool beside the young man one day at the bank, and George was regarding it out of hollow, hopeless eyes, Dan Creyton dropped in and shook hands with him without saying anything.
Thereafter George Chard was Dan Creyton’s friend for weal or for woe.
After all, life and death are small matters.
It is the other things which count—love and hate, and the sunlight down the water.
Nora Creyton, with the warm sympathetic blood of the Celt in her veins; Nora Creyton, with the high, white forehead and the red lips and lustrous eyes, soon became the sunlight of George Chard’s life.
Nora Creyton was a sensible girl. She knew that the prospects of George Chard, bank clerk, with a mother and five sisters dependent on him, were not worthy of serious consideration from a matrimonial point of view. She knew that and a lot more, but she could no more help her heart beating ridiculously fast on occasions, or her cheeks reddening or her eyes sparkling than she could help her breath.
George did not see these things, or, if he had, the last thought that would have entered his mind would be the presumption that his presence accounted for them.
And George and Nora might have gone on for ever caring for one another in secret but for an accident, which will be detailed in another chapter.