Then a woman came to him in his dark hour. His was a stubborn and fighting blood, a blood that would never cry “enough” till it ceased to flow. Yet what a comforting thing it was that this woman, Louise, should be beside him, this woman who knew and who understood. For when she lifted those tender gray eyes and asked him of his big fight, he knew she understood. There was no need of explanation, of apology, for all the failure of all these years. A warm gratitude swept across his heart. And she was so neat and sweet and fair, unspoiled by constant contact with, and intimate knowledge of, the life of the under world; rather was she touched to a wonderful sympathy of understanding. It was good to know such a woman; it would be better to be a friend of such a woman; it would be best of all to love such a woman—if one dared.
“What shall I talk about, Miss Dale? It is all very prosaic and uninteresting, I’m afraid; shockingly primitive, glaringly new.”
“I breakfasted with a stanch friend of yours this morning,” answered Louise, somewhat irrelevantly. She had a feeling—a woman’s feeling—that this earnest, hard-working, reserved man would never blurt out things about himself with the bland self-centredness of most men. She must use all her woman’s wit to draw him out. She did not know yet that he was starved for sympathy—for understanding. She could not know yet that two affinities had drifted through space—near together. A feathery zephyr, blowing where it listed, might widen the space between to an infinity of distance so that they might never know how nearly they had once met; or it might, as its whim dictated, blow them together so that for weal or for woe they would know each the other.
“Mrs. Higgins, at the Bon Ami,” she continued, smiling. “I was so hungry when we got to Velpen, though I had eaten a tremendous breakfast at the Lazy S. But five o’clock is an unholy hour at which to eat one’s breakfast, isn’t it, and I just couldn’t help getting hungry all over again. So I persuaded Mary to stop for another cup of coffee. It is ridiculous the way I eat in your country.”
“It is a good country,” he said, soberly.
“It must be—if you can say so.”
“Because I have failed, shall I cry out that law cannot be enforced in Kemah County? Sometimes—may it be soon—there will come a man big enough to make the law triumphant. He will not be I.”
He was still smarting from his many set-backs. He had worked hard and had accomplished nothing. At the last term of court, though many cases were tried, he had not secured one conviction.
“We shall see,” said Louise, softly. Her look, straight into his eyes, was a glint of sunlight in dark places. Then she laughed.
“Mrs. Higgins said to me: ‘Jimmie Mac hain’t got the sense he was born with. His little, dried-up brain ’d rattle ’round in a mustard seed and he’s gettin’ shet o’ that little so fast it makes my head swim.’ She was telling about times when he hadn’t acted just fair to you. I am glad—from all I hear—that this was taken out of his hands.”