CHAPTER XII
FAIRYLAND
Madeline did not put in an appearance the next day or the day following that. But on the third day she came into the room like a ray of sunshine.
"Well, I'm here," she said, in her bright, eager fashion; "but I was just terribly afraid I wasn't going to get—there now, isn't that a sentence to be remembered?"
Rufus showed his welcome in every line of his face. It was a dull, rainy day, with a blustering wind from the west and a sky that had not revealed a speck of blue since morning. He had lain mostly in one position, looking through the small window, watching the trees on the other side of the road swaying in the wind, and listening to the fitful patter of the rain.
His thoughts had not been always of the most cheerful kind. The days and weeks were passing surely, if slowly, while the great scheme on which he had set his heart and his hopes was at a standstill. He was conscious, too, of a new and terrible hunger that was steadily growing upon him—a hunger for companionship, for sympathy, for love. The coming of Madeline had changed his life, changed his outlook, changed the very centre of gravity. Nothing seemed exactly the same as it did before. Even death had changed its face, and the possibility of a life beyond forced itself upon his brain with a new insistence.
To win success had been his ambition—the one dream of his life. The only immortality he desired was to live in a beneficent invention he had wrought out. Now a new desire possessed him. There was something better than success, something sweeter than fame. If he could win love. If he could know the joy of a perfect sympathy. If—if——.