"Happiness!" he exclaimed scornfully. "If you mean a good, comfortable time, you won't find any certainty about that. But you can get freedom to live out your life—"
"You fail to understand. There is happiness. See,—come here."
She led him to the front window, which was open toward the peaceful little lawn. On the railroad track behind the copse of scrub oak an unskilful train crew was making up a long train of freight cars. Their shouts, punctuated by the rumbling reverberations from the long train as it alternately buckled up and stretched out, was the one discord in the soft night. All else was hushed, even to the giant chimneys in the steel works. One solitary furnace lamped the growing darkness. It was midsummer now in these marshy spots, and a very living nature breathed and pulsed, even in the puddles between the house and the avenue.
"You can hear it in the night air," she murmured; "the joy that comes rising up from the earth, the joy of living. Ah! that is why we are made—to have happiness and joy, to rejoice the heart of God, to make God live, for He must be happiness itself; and when we are happy and feel joy in living, He must grow stronger. And when we are weak and bitter, when the world haunts us as I felt this afternoon on leaving the superintendent, when men strike and starve, and others are hard and grasping—then He must shrink and grow small and suffer. There is happiness," she ended, breathing her belief as a prayer into the solitude and night.
"What will you do to get it?" Sommers asked, shortly.
"Do to get it?" She drew back from the window, her figure tense. "When it comes within my grasp, I will do everything, everything, and nothing shall hinder me."
"Meantime?" the doctor questioned significantly.
"Don't ask me!" She sank into a chair and covered her eyes with her hand.
And neither spoke until the sound of footsteps was heard on the walk.
"There is Mrs. Ducharme coming home from the charmer of devils. It is time for me to go," Sommers said.
The room was so dark that he could not see her face, as he extended his hand; but he could feel the repressed breathing, the passionate air about her person.