“Wait, Eleanor!” The man sprang to his feet, the mask lifting from his face, and there stood revealed a multitude of emotions, unseen of the world, that flashed from the depths of his brown eyes and quivered in the angles of his mouth. He came quickly over and took her hand between his own.
“I’m proud of you,”––a world of tenderness was in his voice––“unspeakably proud––for I love you. I’ve done my best to keep us apart, yet all the time I believed with you. Nature is higher than man, and no power on earth can prove it otherwise.” He looked 122 into the softest of brown eyes, and his voice trembled. “Beside you the world is nothing. Its approval or its condemnation are things to be laughed at. With you I challenge conventionality––society––everything.” He bent over her hand almost reverently and touched it softly with his lips.
“Farewell––until I come,” he said. 123
Chapter II––The Leap
A man and a woman emerged from the dilapidated day-car as it drew up before the tiny, sanded station which marked the terminus of the railway. The man was tall, clean-shaven, quick of step and of glance. The woman was likewise tall, well-gloved, and, strange phenomenon at a country station, carried no parcels.
Though easily the centre of attention, the couple were far from being alone. On the contrary, the car and platform fairly swarmed with humanity. Men mostly composed the throng that alighted––big, weather-stained fellows in rough jeans and denims. In the background, as spectators moved or lounged a sprinkling of others: thinner, lighter, enveloped in felt, woollen and buckskin, a fringe of heavy hair peeping out at their backs beneath the broad hat-brims. A few women were intermingled. Coarsely gowned, sun-browned, they 124 stood; themselves like suns, but each the centre of a system of bleach-haired minor satellites. It was into this heterogeneous mass that the tall man elbowed his way, a neat grip in either hand; the woman following closely in his wake, her skirts carefully lifted.
Clear of the out-flowing stream the man put down the satchels, and looked over the heads of the motley crowd into the still more motley street beyond. Two short rows of one-story buildings, distinctive by the brightness of new lumber on their sheltered side, bordered a narrow street, half clogged by the teams of visiting farmers. Not the faintest clue to a hostelry was visible, and the eyes of the man wandered back, interrupting by the way another pair of eyes frankly inquisitive.
The curious one was short; by comparison his face was still shorter, and round. From his chin a tiny tuft of whiskers protruded, like the handle of a gourd. Never was countenance more unmistakably labelled good-humored, Americanized German.
The eyes of the tall man stopped. 125
“Is there a hotel in this”––he groped for a classification––“this city?” he asked.