"Happy? Rich? He said he was both—and all he had was eighteen dollars and his two big hands! Just fancy that, will you? He might as well have said eighteen cents; it would have been about as much! And I—what did I tell him? I told him I, with all my money and everything, was vacant, empty, futile! Just those words. And—God help me, I—I am!"
Suddenly, she felt her eyes were wet. What was the reason? Herself she knew not. All she knew was that with her beautiful and queenly head bowed on the arm of her Japanese silk morning gown, as its loose sleeves lay along the edge of the Chippendale table, she was crying like a child.
Crying bitterly; and yet in a kind of new, strange joy. Crying with tears so bitter-sweet that she, herself, could not half understand them; could not fathom the deeper meaning that lay hidden there.
"If!" she whispered to her heart. "If only I were of his class, or he of mine!"
And Gabriel, what of him?
As he swung north and westward, day by day, on the long hike toward Niagara, the memory of the girl went with him, and hour by hour bore him company.
He was not forgetting. Could he forget? Strive as he might, to thrust her out of his heart and soul, she still indwelt there.
Not all his philosophy, nor all his realization that this woman he had saved, this woman who had lain in his two arms and mingled her breath with his, belonged to another and an alien class, could banish her.
And as he strode along, swinging his knotted stick at the daisies and pondering on all that might have been and now could never be, a sudden, passionate longing burst over him, as a long sea-roller, hurled against a cliff, flings upward in vast tourbillions of spume.
Raising his face to the summer sky, his bare head high with emotion and his eyes wide with the thought of strange possibilities that shook and intoxicated him, he cried: