Granville caught it eagerly. “Oh, Ellen,” he murmured.
But she withdrew her hand quickly. “We have always been good friends, and we always will be,” said she, and her tone was unmistakable. The young man shrank back.
“Yes, we always will, Ellen,” he said, in a faithful voice, with a note of pain in it.
“Good-night,” said Ellen again.
“Good-night,” responded Granville, and turned his plodding back on the girl and retraced his laborious steps towards his own home, which he had just passed. There come times for all souls when the broad light of the path of humanity seems to pale to insignificance before the intensity of the one little search-light of personality. Granville Joy felt as if the eternal problem of the rich and poor, of labor and capital, of justice and equality, was as nothing before the desire of his heart for that one girl who was disappearing from his sight behind the veil of virgin snow.
Chapter L
When Ellen came in sight of her house that night she saw her father's bent figure moving down the path with sidewise motions of a broom. He had been out at short intervals all the afternoon, that she should not have to wade through drifts to the door. The electric-light shone full on this narrow, cleared track and the toiling figure.
“Hullo, father!” Ellen called out. Andrew turned, and his face lit with love and welcome and solicitude.
“Be you dreadful snowy?” he asked.
“Oh no, father, not very.”