“I wish I were different, Lyman,” she responded, and, he felt, with a double meaning.
“I don't,” he said, and stroked her hair with a great tenderness, which seemed for the time to quite fill and satisfy his heart. He was a man of measureless patience, born to a firm conviction of the journey's end.
“There are worse things than loving a good woman your whole life and never having her,” he said to himself as he went home, but he said it without its full meaning. Risley's “nerves” were always lighted by the lamp of his own hope, which threw a gleam over unknown seas.
Chapter XXVI
Robert Lloyd accompanied Ellen home, though she had said timidly that she was not in the least afraid, that she would not trouble any one, that she could take a car. Cynthia herself had insisted that Robert should escort her.
“It's too late for you to be out alone,” she said, and the girl seemed to perceive dimly a hedge of conventionality which she had not hitherto known. She had often taken a car when she was alone of an evening, without a thought of anything questionable. Some of the conductors lived near Ellen, and she felt as if she were under personal friendly escort. “I know the conductor on that car, and it would take me right home, and I am not in the least afraid,” she said to Robert, as the car came rocking down the street when they emerged from Cynthia's grounds.
“It's a lovely night,” Robert said, speaking quickly as they paused on the sidewalk. “I am not going to let you go alone, anyway. We will take the car if you say so, but what do you say to walking? It's a lovely night.”
It actually flashed through Ellen's mind—to such small issues of finance had she been accustomed—that the young man might insist upon paying her car-fare if he went with her on the car.
“I would like to walk, but I am sorry to put you to so much trouble,” she said, a little awkwardly.
“Oh, I like to walk,” returned Robert. “I don't walk half enough,” and they went together down the lighted street. Suddenly to Ellen there came a vivid remembrance, so vivid that it seemed almost like actual repetition of the time when she, a little child, maddened by the sudden awakening of the depths of her nature, had come down this same street. She saw that same brilliant market-window where she had stopped and stared, to the momentary forgetfulness of her troubles in the spectacular display of that which was entirely outside them. Curiously enough, Robert drew her to a full stop that night before the same window. It was one of those strange cases of apparent telepathy which one sometimes notices. When Ellen looked at the market-window, with a flash of reminiscence, Robert immediately drew her to a stop before it. “That is quite a study in color,” he said. “I fancy there are a good many unrecognized artists among market-men.”