VII
She rose after a time, her eyes not seeking his.
"Grace will be coming home directly," she said briskly. "I must get supper ready."
"One thing"—he raised a restraining hand—"keep quiet about this. I've told you too much already."
For half an instant Laura Rawn almost wondered whether this thing might not be true. Such things had happened in this country. Was there not daily proof before her eyes? And might not fortune reverse her wheel for them also; might not lightning choose, as sometimes elsewhere it had chosen, a humble and unimportant spot for its alighting? Who can read the plans of the immortal gods? asked the pagans of old. Who, asked Laura Rawn, devout Christian, can foresee the plans of a Divine Providence?
As for John Rawn, he troubled but little over the immortal gods or over a Divine Providence, feeling small need of the aid of either. He had himself.
CHAPTER VII
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MEN
I
Thus far, the Rawn planet had moved but in restricted orbit, to wit: one bounded as to one extremity by the dingy yard and narrow walls of a home rented at twenty dollars a month; at the other, by the still dingier and more prosaic business surroundings of a railway's general offices. Narrow and dull enough the Rawn life had been, and in such a life, lived on into middle age, you scarce could have blamed a man had he settled back for ever into the grip of the upreaching fingers of monotony. The half mechanical and parrot-like repetition of set phrases in a restricted line of business correspondence for Rawn himself, day after day; the dull and endless round of homekeeping duties for the wife—what but narrowness and dullness could come out of life such as this? Wherefore you should not have been surprised had you been told that Grace Rawn was simply the outgrowth of this sort of home, this sort of life, not much different from other girls of her class.