Bud drew her to him, and one hand smoothed her pretty brown hair with rough tenderness. For a moment her head rested against his broad bosom. Then a deep sigh came, and Nan looked up, smiling into the steady gray eyes gazing down at her, through a mist of welling tears.
"My dear—dear old Daddy," she murmured, as the tears finally overflowed and slowly rolled down her cheeks.
CHAPTER XIV
THE KNOCKING ON THE DOOR
It seemed like the hand of Destiny that Elvine van Blooren should wander across the path of Jeffrey Masters at a moment when all the fruits of his ambition seemed to be falling into his outspread-hands. It was surely the work of Fate that instant recognition of her desirability leaped in his heart, so that some six weeks later they should set out on their life's journey together on the eastward bound mail train, which bore, in its foremost van, the mails for the world outside, gathered in from every district in the region of Calthorpe.
Their happiness was perfect. In six weeks' time the metamorphosis in the woman had been as complete as it was in the case of the man.
For the man it seemed that life had opened out an entirely new vista. He had warmed under the influence of his new passion. The angles in his character seemed to have softened. Achievement had receded into its due proportion in his focus. The world had become peopled with warm living creatures whose strivings were now a source of sympathy to him. Life no longer moved about him detached, unappealing.
So with the woman. Elvine van Blooren's past was her own. Whatever it was she hugged it to herself, and the very process of doing so had helped to harden her.
But she possessed fires she had wilfully hidden, even from herself. For four years she had lived a life of desperate calculation against all those things she most dreaded, till she felt she had converted herself into a machine free from all trammeling emotions, equipped solely to execute the purpose she had set her mind on.
These fires were awakened early. Their awakening had been all unknown to her. Yet she had admitted them when she had warned her mother that she intended to "like" the man she ultimately married. All subconsciously she had "liked" Jeffrey Masters from their first formal meeting. Further acquaintance had deepened her liking. The keen eyes possessed strong qualities of appeal. The decision of his clean-cut face suggested all that strength which appealed to her.