After the expected sensations of the usual home greeting and the accustomed kiss, it gave a spice to intimacy to meet perforce as strangers. She leaned partly against him as she talked to Mr. Leverich, and he pressed her arm with his strong fingers under cover of her cloak and made the color come and go in her cheek; her eyes mutely implored him to stop, and he enjoyed her confusion. Husband and wife looked well together, in a certain vitality of movement and expression common to both which made others instinctively turn to observe them.
“I have been trying to discover my husband all the way across,” she complained to Leverich. “I was sure that he was on this boat. Why didn’t you look out for me, Justin?”
“You didn’t say you were going in town to-day,” he expostulated.
“How often have I told you to look out for me? I am likely to go in at any time. I had to get some things for the children. Have you—have you seen anyone to-day?” She spoke disconnectedly, as conscious as a girl of the disconcerting pressure on her arm.
“No—oh, yes; I saw Eugene Larue this morning, he’s back from the other side.”
“Did he say when he would be out?”
“No.”
“Did you ask him?”
“No. The fact is, Lois, I only saw him for a moment and I never thought about it.”
“Oh, it doesn’t make any difference. I wanted to speak to you about Theodosia; I’ve had a letter, and she’s coming. We are going to have a young lady as a visitor this winter,” she added formally in explanation to Mr. Leverich, who still stood at her elbow. “She’s coming up North to study music; she’s very pretty, I believe, and clever.”
“A relation?” hazarded Mr. Leverich.
“Yes; she’s a young cousin of mine—I haven’t seen her since she was a child. It will be so pleasant to have a girl in the house.”
“You like company,” he returned approvingly, “my wife does, too; we always have a houseful. She says I show off better when we have visitors—can’t let my angry passions rise. By the way, Alexander, what time shall I bring the books over to-night?”
Lois Alexander’s startled, questioning glance sought her husband’s, and his gave a gravely confidential assent before he answered:
“Any time you say.”
“Will eight o’clock be too early?”
“No, that will suit me very well.”
“Well, good-by!” He took off his hat in farewell to Lois, and disappeared in the crowd, as his broad shoulders forced a sinuous passage through the throng.
“How are the children?” Justin asked his wife.
“They’re all right.” She paused, and then said: “If you are to look over those books, I suppose we can’t go to the Calenders’ to-night.”
“No.” The dark line of the pier struck athwart the dusky light and divided the windows in two. “At least, I cannot, but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t go.”
“You know that I will not go without you.”
“Other women do.”
“Well, I will not.”
“What a foolish girl!” His tone was fond. “Then—take care!” The boat had bumped into the dock; in the struggling press of the stampeding crowd, Lois clung to her husband’s arm and he strove to ward off the crush from her. When they were at last over the gang-plank, joining in the hurrying, straggling procession toward the train, he looked at her with tender solicitude.
“You shouldn’t come out on the boat so late as this. Was it too much for you?”
“Oh, no, no! I do this alone lots of times.” She felt so vividly happy that her breathlessness was hardly an annoyance as they dodged in front of the incoming drays of another boat and waved aside the impeding newsboys crying the evening papers.
She foresaw that they would be separated in the train, and found voice enough to whisper to him:
“Are you to decide to-night?”
“I have virtually decided now.”
“To accept?”
“Yes.”
Her breath came suddenly; with the monosyllable an electric wave had set the pulses of both tingling. The spoken word had not failed of its wonted power; it had at this moment opened a gate hitherto closed. Both husband and wife felt their feet at last set on the great highroad of modern romance, the road to wealth, along which ride daily, as of old, knights in armor, duly caparisoned, with shield and spear, bent, not on deeds of chivalry, but on one glittering quest—a grim pathway, veiled by a golden haze.
CHAPTER TWO
It was a mighty hour. Justin, sitting by the open window with his head upon his hand, looking out into the night, saw but dimly the pale shining of the familiar stars, in the search for the rising star of his own future. It was far on in the small hours, and he had not yet slept, although he had come up-stairs at twelve o’clock with the firm intention of undressing and going to bed at once. He had, instead, dropped down into the wicker chair in the unlighted sitting-room to think for a few moments—and a few moments—and a few moments more.
The dining-table which he had left was filled with sheets of paper covered with fine figures, and his mind at first continually reverted to them, multiplying, subtracting, and correcting with keen facility, and with infinitesimal changes in the final result, which he knew, notwithstanding, could be only approximate, no matter how painstakingly his fancy strove to render it exact.
After a while, however, other thoughts asserted themselves. The vast influences of the night were around him as from the deep places of the universe—the depth of dusky gloom, the depth of silence. The window looked out over a garden, but in this dusky gloom it had lost the semblance of earth and seemed, instead, but the under part of an enveloping cloud in which he was the only breathing human life. The vague dark branches of the trees waving across the lesser darkness spoke of even deeper mystery in their mute witness to that breath from the unseen which moved them.
It was not the problem of the universe of which all this spoke to Justin Alexander, though as such it had been part and parcel of his questioning youth. The days when he might have sung with Omar were gone with those speculative midnight hours, the foregathering with death, the conscious search for higher meanings, the effort to solve the unknowable; whatever philosophy was evolved from those journeys into the dark was labeled and put away on a remote shelf, where the mind occasionally reverted to it with a sigh of thoughtful possession, but for which there was no longer any daily use. There was even a chance that on bringing the precious package out into the modern daylight it might be found to have changed its color entirely.
The problem of his own life was what this hour held in its shifting hold for