III
For a time Randolph Chance was fairly dazed by the suddenness with which his fortune changed. Yesterday it was down—deep down; to-day it had gone flying up. He had followed Constance Leigh when she walked to the lake in the afternoon; had helped her from a perilous place in the midst of rough winds and still rougher waves; and as he took her from the pier their eyes had met, and this was why, later on, he sat by his friend's fireside in a state of bewildered rapture.
An outsider, one of the world's common folk, would have made but little out of Randolph's brief, rough-hewn sentences. But Loveland was finely strung; he understood.
“I can't forget that look. It breaks me all up every time I think of it.”
Randolph spoke like a man who was talking to himself.
“It's so unreal—I may have dreamed it,” he went on slowly. “I tell you, Steve”—this with a sudden turn—“I don't dare to hope, but if——”
There was no perceptible tremor in his voice, but the sentence broke sharply.
“I know, old man, I know,” said Steve in his gentlest voice.
And he poked the fire softly between the ribs of the grate.
It seemed that Randolph's hope was not without foundation, for after he had been the toy of fate somewhat longer he came to Steve one night with great news, and yet no news to Steve, who had long discerned the signs of the times and had been dreading what he saw must come. Now, although he felt sharp pangs of grief on seeing his boon and sole companion snatched from him and about to be offered up upon the altar matrimonial, yet he rejoiced thereat with the full force of his unselfish nature.