All she knew was that with her beautiful and queenly head
bowed on the arm of her Japanese silk morning gown, as its loose sleeves
lay along the edge of the Chippendale table, she was crying like a
child.
Crying bitterly; and yet in a kind of new, strange joy. Crying with
tears so bitter-sweet that she, herself, could not half understand them;
could not fathom the deeper meaning that lay hidden there.
"If!" she whispered to her heart. "If only I were of his class, or he of
mine!"
And Gabriel, what of him?
As he swung north and westward, day by day, on the long hike toward
Niagara, the memory of the girl went with him, and hour by hour bore him
company.
He was not forgetting. Could he forget? Strive as he might, to thrust
her out of his heart and soul, she still indwelt there.
Not all his philosophy, nor all his realization that this woman he had
saved, this woman who had lain in his two arms and mingled her breath
with his, belonged to another and an alien class, could banish her.
And as he strode along, swinging his knotted stick at the daisies and
pondering on all that might have been and now could never be, a sudden,
passionate longing burst over him, as a long sea-roller, hurled against
a cliff, flings upward in vast tourbillions of spume.
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