And as he stood looking at it, with the machinery roaring about him, and the sunlight beating in through steel-barred windows sixty feet high, in all the confusion of shavings and oil-soaked wood, polished sliding shafts streaked with thick blue grease, stifling odours of creosote and oily "wipes", Wolf's eyes would fill with tears and he would shake his head at his own emotion, and try to laugh it away.
After awhile he took another little picture of her, this one taken under a taut parasol in bright sunlight, and fitted it over the opposite faces; and then when he had studied one picture he could turn to the other, and perhaps go back to the first before his eyes were satisfied.
And if during the day some thought brought her suddenly to mind, he would stop short in whatever he was doing, and remember her little timid upglancing look as she hazarded, at breakfast, some question about his work, or remember her enthusiasm, on a country tramp, for the chance meal at some wayside restaurant, and sheer love of her would overwhelm him, and he would find his eyes brimming again.
CHAPTER XXVI
So the summer fled, and before she fairly realized it Norma saw the leaves colouring behind the little house like a wall of fire, and rustled them with her feet when she tramped with Wolf's big collie into the woods. The air grew clearer and thinner, sunset came too soon, and a delicate beading of dew loitered on the shady side of the house until almost noon.
One October day, when she had been six months a wife, Norma made her first call upon Annie von Behrens. Alice she had seen several times, when she had stopped in, late in the summer mornings, to entertain the invalid with her first adventures in housekeeping, and chat with Miss Slater. But Chris she had quite deliberately avoided. He had written her from Canada a brief and charming note, which she had shown Wolf, and he and Alice had had their share in the general family gift of silver, the crates and bags and boxes of spoons and bowls and teapots that had anticipated every possible table need of the Sheridans for generations to come. But that was all; she had not seen Chris, and did not want to see him.
"The whole thing is rather like a sickness, in my mind," she told Wolf, "and I don't want to see him any more than you would a doctor or a nurse that was associated with illness. I don't know what we—what I was thinking about!"
"But you think he really—loved you—Nono?"