Dick never spoke of love, but the way was pointed not only by the easy

restfulness of their comradeship, but in the very atmosphere that

surrounded them. She read it half-consciously in the looks of father and

mother as they met and accepted Dick's intimacy in the house, in the

warmth of Mrs. Percival's motherly affection when Madeline ran in for

one of her frequent calls. Life was full of it, like the gentle

half-warmth that comes before the sun has quite peeped over the horizon

on a summer morning; and it was well that this dawn to their day should

be a long one. Madeline had been away the greater part of four years,

and she was now in no hurry to cut short her reunion with the old home

life. Dick, too, had his beginnings to make, man-fashion, and they ought

to be made before he took on himself the full life of a man. So she was

happily content to drift, conscious in a vague dreamy way that the drift

was in the right direction, feeling the situation without analyzing it.

It was a condition of affairs like Madeline herself, gently

affectionate, but not passionate or deeply emotional. She was not of the

type of women who rise up and control destiny.

Norris, for all his passive exterior, had undercurrents that were fervid

and powerful, and this first summer in the West, unruffled on its

surface, stirred them and sent his life whirling along their

irresistible streams. He never lost the sense that he was an outsider,

admitted on sufferance to see the happiness of others and allowed to

pick up their crumbs. If hard work, oblivion and lovelessness were to be

his lot, the hardest of these was lovelessness. Much as he loved Dick he

continually resented that young man's careless acceptance of the good

things of life, and most of all did his irritation grow at Percival's

way of taking Madeline for granted, enjoying her beauty, her sympathy,

the grace that she threw over everything, and yet, thought Ellery, never

half appreciating them. He himself bowed before them with an adoration

that was framed in anguish because these things were, and were not for

him. More and more cruel grew the knowledge that the currents of his

life were gall and wormwood, flowing through wastes of bitterness.

Yet, along with the new grief came a new awakening, at first dimly felt

by Madeline alone, then read with greater and greater clearness.

But of all undercurrents, Dick, prime mover and chief talker, remained

unconscious, absorbed in his own dawning career, delighting in his two

friends chiefly as hearers and sympathizers with his multitudinous

ideas.

So it happened that one August afternoon, when it was late enough for

the sun to have lost its fury, a not too strenuous breeze drove their

tiny yacht through a channel which stretched enticingly between a wooded

island and the jutting mainland.




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