For a moment he stood meditating a further word, then stepped into the hall. Elsie, midway on the stairs, had turned and was looking down at him with a face wherein the eyes were wistful and brows perplexed. She guiltily lowered her lashes and turned away, but that momentary pause—that subtle interplay of doubt and dream—had given the soldier a pleasure deeper than words.
Jennie was waiting at the door of the tiny room in which Elsie was to sleep, her face glowing with admiration and love. "Oh, you queenly girl!" she cried, with a convulsive clasp of her strong arms. "I can't get over the wonder of your being here in our little house. You ought to live always in a castle."
Elsie smiled, but with tears in her eyes. "You're a dear, good girl. I never had a truer friend."
"I wish you were poor!" said Jennie, as they entered the plain little room; "then you could come here as a missionary or something, and we could have you with us all the time. I hate to think of your going away to-morrow."
"You must come and see me in Washington."
"Oh no! That wouldn't do!" said Jennie, half alarmed. "It might spoil me for life out here. You must visit us again."
There was a note of honest, almost boyish suffering in Jennie's entreaties which moved the daughter of wealth very deeply, and she went to her bed with a feeling of loss, as though she were taking leave of something very sweet and elementally comforting.
She thought of her first lover, and her cheeks burned with disgust of her folly. She thought of two or three good, manly suitors whose protestations of love had left her cold and humorously critical. On Lawson's suit she lingered, for he was still a possibility should she decide to put her soldier-lover away. "But I have done so—definitely," she said to some pleading within herself. "I can't marry him; our lives are ordered on divergent lines. I can't come here to live."
"Happiness is not dependent on material things," argued her newly awakened self. "He loves you—he is handsome and true and good."