"I was on my way to you. All last winter in Alaska ... in the long night, Olivia. I should have come soon."

"Oh," I cried, "I have been drawn across the sea to you. All the way I felt you calling!"

"We had to meet again; had to!"

After a time I insisted that he should sit down. "You haven't had any tea." I tried to get control of myself. I was crossing the room to ring when he swept me up again.

"Look here, Olivia, I don't want any tea. I want you. G.o.d!" he said, "do you know how I want you?" All at once I was crying on his breast.

"Oh, Helmeth, Helmeth, do you know you have only seen me twice in your life."

"And both times," he insisted, "I've wanted to marry you."

It was two or three days before we spoke of marriage again. I believe I scarcely thought of it; we had all the past to account for, and the present. We had moments of strangeness, and then we would kiss, and all the years would seem to each of us as full of the other as the very hour.

"Where were you, Helmeth, the second summer after we met?" I had told him of my visit to Chicago and the dream of him I had had there.

"Out in Arizona, carrying a surveyor's chain, dreaming of _you_! Often when the moonlight was all over that country like a lake, I would walk and walk. I had long talks with you; they were the only improving conversation I had."

"For years," I said, "that dream of you was the only thing that kept my Gift awake. Times I would lose it, and then I would dream again and it would come back. I know now when I lost it completely, it was about a year before I saw you that time in Chicago." I had told him of that, too.

"That year I married." I could see that there was something in the recollection always that weighed upon him.

"I didn't," he said, "until after my aunt had told me about you. I went back there when she died; she was always good to me. You know, don't you, Olive, that in spite of everything ... everything ... there is only you."

"Let us not talk of it." I do not know how it is proper to feel on such occasions, but I supposed that he must have had as I had, stinging tears to think of the dead and how their love was overmatched by this present wonder. I would have had, somehow, Tommy and my boy to share in it.

I went rather tardily to make my apologies to Mrs. Franklin Shane. I hope they sounded natural.

"My _dear_! you needn't expect me to be surprised at _anything_ Helmeth Garrett does." She talked habitually in italics. "My husband says that it is only because he so generally does right, that it is at all possible to get along with him." I snapped up crumbs like this with avidity.

"His wife, too, you must have known her." I hinted. This was at the end of a rather complete account of Helmeth's business relations with Mr.

Shane.

"Oh, well," I could see Christian charity struggling with Mrs. Shane's profound conviction of the rect.i.tude of her own way of life. "She was a _good_ woman, but no--imagination." She was so pleased to have hit upon a word which carried no intrinsic condemnation that she repeated it.

"No imagination whatever. One feels," she modified the edge of her judgment still further, "that so much might have been made out of Mr.

Garrett. These self-made men are so difficult."

"Are you difficult?" I demanded when I had retailed the conversation to him that evening.

"I suppose so; anyway I am self-made. She is right so far; I dare say it is badly done. You'll have to take a few tucks in me."

"Not a tuck. I like you the way you are. Oh, I like you ... I like you _so_!" There was an interval after this before we could go on again.

"Tell me how you made yourself, Helmeth. Don't leave anything out, not a single thing."

"By mistakes mostly. Every time I had made one I knew it was a mistake and I didn't do it again. I don't know that I'm much of a success anyway, but I've got a large a.s.sortment of things not to do."

"That was the way I learned how to act; filling in behind!"

"I thought that came by instinct. What counts with a man, is not so much getting to know how to do it, but getting a chance to prove to other people that he knows how."

"I've been through that too," I told him, but he was bent on making himself clear.

"I suppose I ought to tell you, Olivia, I'm only a sort of scab engineer. I haven't any papers."

"But if you can do the work? Mrs. Shane said----"

"Oh, Shane will trust me; he's learned. What hurts is to have worked up a scheme to the point where it is necessary to have outside capital, and then have one of the outsiders stick out for a certificated engineer.

That's what comes of my uncle's notion that a man should 'pick up' his professional training." There was the core of that old bitterness rankling in him still; he could not yield himself quite to consolation.

"But you have got on, Helmeth, you got _here_." What "here" meant to me exactly, was more than my lover, more than the pleasant room behind us, the obsequious servitors, more even than the sleek, silvered river and the towered banks that took on shapes of romance under the London gray.

There was something in the word to me of fulfilment, the knowledge of things done, the certainty of an una.s.sailed capacity for doing. We were sitting with the broad window flung open, the top of a lime tree tapping the sill of it with soft shouldering touches, as of some wild creature against its mate, creaking a little in somnolent content. I put out my hand to touch his knee--oh, as I might have done it if the "here" had been the point toward which we had travelled together all these years.

He laughed then as he often did when I touched him, a man's short full laugh of repletion. He thrust out his knee quite frankly till it touched mine, and closed his hand over my fingers; he returned to what had been in the air the previous moment with an effort. The suspicion that it was an effort, was all I had to prepare me for what was about to leap upon me.

"Oh, I've pulled through, I've pulled through. But I'm not where I might have been. And I'm not rich, Olivia. Not what is called rich."

"Is being called rich one of the things that goes with--what was it you called yourself--a promoting engineer?"

"It goes with it if you are any good at it. Not that I care about money except for what it stands for ... and then there are the girls."

"You have--girls." It struck me as absurd that I hadn't thought of it until that moment.

"I thought Mrs. Shane would have told you. I have two. It isn't going to make any difference with you, Olivia?"

"Ah, what difference should it make!" I was apprised within me by the haste I made to cover my consternation, that there was more difference in it than my words allowed. "Children of yours?" I said. "So much more of you for me to love." The apprehension was whelmed in the possessing movement with which he drew me to his breast.

CHAPTER III

We Had to go back to the subject of course, it couldn't be left hanging in the air like that. It was a day or two later at Hampton Court, where we had gone for no reason really, except that it seemed a more commensurate background for what was going on in us, the identification in each by the other, of the springs of immortal pa.s.sion. We had roved through all the rooms, recharged for us with the exceptional experience, and come out at last on the river bank where there was quite a holiday air among the houseboats.

Behind us we could hear the soft slither of the fountain in the sunk garden; the warm sun streaming on us through the filmy air, the flutter of curtains in the houseboats above the little pots of geraniums, the voices of young people laughing and calling across, began to steal across my mind with a sense of the extraordinary richness of life. Here was all the stuff of which I had built up my earliest dreams of the Shining Destiny ... young people growing up about me ... room to stretch my capacity to the uttermost ... the orderly social procedure. For the moment I believed that I might turn back on that path my feet had failed in, and find in it all that I had missed. I recalled that there were always children in my dream. For the instant they were back ... little heads and faces ... all the eyes on me ... soft curls, like wisps of gossamer. I suppose there must be such little unclaimed souls forever hovering and flitting, little winged things, to love's mighty candle.

What should there be in the touch of a man's hand on a woman's that they should come crowding to it like homing doves?

There was a maid going by with her charge, one of those glowing fair-haired English children who supply us with the images by which we prefigure the angelic choirs. Helmeth held out his hand to the boy, and with that swift spark that pa.s.ses between the young and those by whom they are beloved, he toddled forward and laid hold of the inviting finger.

If I had had more experience of the pang that shot through me then, I should have known it for jealousy. It drove me on toward what, until now, I had avoided.

"Tell me about your girls, Helmeth." He felt in the pocket of his coat.

"If you would care to see them----" He was so pleased and shy, I suppose he must have understood better than I how it was with me. "They are with an aunt in Los Angeles; it was handier for me to see them when I ran up from Mexico. They are rather decent kiddies. You'll see them when they come to New York this winter."