The girl nodded sadly.
"I know," she said. "I realize she lived to regret what she had done. I am not blaming her. But for all that, she never can mean to me what she might have meant. Rather I shall always think of her as a handsome, stately old lady who was your friend and loved you."
She turned to leave him, but he refused to let her go.
"Delight," he cried, drawing her closer, "will your grandmother be dearer to you because she loved me? Tell me, sweetheart! Do I mean anything in your life? You are the only thing that matters in mine."
He saw a radiance flash into her wonderful eyes, and in another instant her head was against his breast.
"It is only because of you, Bob," she whispered, clinging to him, "that I can forgive the Lees at all."
CHAPTER XVIII
THE PROGRESS OF ANOTHER ROMANCE
The ecstasy that came to Robert Morton with his new-found happiness swept before it the clouds that had overcast his sky, until his horizon was almost as radiant as it had been on the day of his arrival at Wilton. Janoah Eldridge came no more to the Spence cottage; Snelling had vanished; the Galbraiths were occupied with their own affairs; and the barrier between Bob and Willie began slowly to wear away. The little old man was of far too believing and charitable a nature to hold out long against his own optimism; moreover, he detested strife and was much more willing to endure a wrong than to harbor ill feeling; hence he was only too ready to reconstruct Janoah's venomous story into terms of his native blind faith. He did not, to be sure, understand, and for days and nights he puzzled ceaselessly over the problem events presented; but as no light was forthcoming, his zest in the enigma cooled until the mystery took on the unfathomable quality of various other mysteries he had wrestled with and finally shelved as unanswerable. There was the invention to finish, and so eager was he to see it completed that to this interest every other thought was subordinated. Therefore, although misgivings assailed him, they gradually receded into his subconsciousness, leaving behind them much of the good will he had formerly cherished toward Robert Morton.