“It was a lonely place up there in the mountains and the first night——”
He had felt that he must tell her everything, but he could not do it; he could not confess how narrowly he had escaped taking himself out of life by the back door. Her own fine courage, the success now crowning her endeavour—these things taunted him; he could not tell her how near he had been to throwing down his sword in the face of the enemy. With courage, sincerity and industry she was storming the citadels of a world that had heaped favours upon him only to magnify the humiliation of his failures. He must speak with confidence of his to-morrows to this woman if he would hold her respect.
“I’m going to try harder. I guess I’ve never tried at all. I’ve got a job: Walsh is going to take me into his office; you’ve seen him, he’s a grand old fellow. While you are off making your drawings I shall be trying to learn how to sell groceries. Isn’t that most uninteresting?”
She bent toward him eagerly.
“Oh, no, it is fine! It is just the right thing. I am glad—so glad!”
His heart bounded as he saw how pleased she was—no cloud now on those violet seas; and she smiled that quick rare smile of hers.
“Please don’t grow too famous to remember a poor struggling jobber in canned goods and such. You see, you’ve rather put it up to me to do something. I shan’t get very high—I couldn’t—but I’m going to do the best I can. A man I met up there in the hills—a minister—a priest, he would call himself, made me feel my lack of importance in the world in a new way. He said he thought the devil wouldn’t care for my soul—that I was a clumsy piece of Satan’s practice-work, not worth putting on exhibition in the hall of fame down below. That took the conceit out of me; I had imagined myself a superior article.”
“Well, when you’re at work you won’t have time to think of such things,” she answered, not sanctioning his way of joking about it.
“But I shall think of you every day, and I shall wonder where you are and how your work prospers; and sometimes I shall see you——”
“We shall always be good friends, of course.”