She laughed bitterly.
"An enchanted journey which leads to two very dreary attic rooms on the sixth floor of a poverty-stricken house," she reminded him. "It leads back to the smoke-stained city, to the four walls within which one dreams empty dreams."
"It isn't so bad as that," he protested.
Her lips trembled for a moment; she half closed her eyes. An impulse of pain passed like a spasm across her tired features.
"It is different for you," she murmured. "Every day you escape. For me there is no escape."
He felt a momentary twinge of selfishness. Yet, after all, the great truths were incontrovertible. He could lighten her lot but little. There was very little of himself that he could give her—of his youth, his strength, his vigorous hold upon life. Through all the tangle of his expanding interests in existence, the medley of strange happenings in which he found himself involved, one thing alone was clear. He was passing on into a life making larger demands upon, him, a life in which their companionship must naturally become a slighter thing. Nevertheless, he spoke to her reassuringly.
"You cannot believe, Ruth," he said, "that I shall ever forget? We have been through too much together, too many dark days."
She sighed.
"There wasn't much for either of us to look forward to, was there, when we first looked down on the river together and you began to tell me fairy stories."
"They kept our courage alive," he declared. "I am not sure that they are not coming true."