"I never before had an intimate friend," he said, one morning, with a wondering realization of the fact. "I knew so many people that I never guessed it, Elsie, but I've been lonely all my life. I can't see how I could be any happier than I am now."
They had just risen from the breakfast-table.
Across it Elsie met her husband's eyes; her own infinitely wise, splendidly happy as his, yet touched with that delicate raillery which caressed and laughed at him.
"Oh, yes!" she dissented. "Yes, Anthony."
Puzzled, he searched her meaning in her shining gaze.
"I could be happier?"
"Yes. We could be."
"But——?"
She came around the table and told him the answer, putting her hands into his. She did not speak shyly, but proudly, with frank courage and comradeship.
An hour later, when Adriance went down the long hill to his day's work, he carried himself with a dignity new as the blended exaltation and dread that paled his face. Once he stopped in the snapping March wind to bare his head and draw a full, deep breath, looking up at the bright-blue sky where tufts of white cloud sailed. Although the season was so far advanced, new-fallen snow overlay road and hills, so that Adriance seemed to himself as standing between two surfaces of pure, glinting brightness. His thoughts were only now becoming articulate, yet a sense of final change had settled through him. His manhood had come to full dignity. Now he knew what he had done when he snatched Elsie Murray out of her cross-current of life and took her for himself. He had found love like a jewel on the road; content had reared a shelter for his inexperience. Now, he stood as protector and shelter as long as he should live for the weaker ones who were his. And with responsibility, ambition sprang fully grown to life and challenged him. Was his wife to rank as a chauffeur's wife, and nothing more? Was their child to be reared in that place, and he to give the two nothing better? Anthony Adriance passed his glance, with his father's cold accuracy of appraisal, over the great factory lying far down at the foot of the cliffs, where he himself was awaited to drive a truck.