They went
along evenly, happily, perhaps dreamily, letting the present and the
future take care of themselves as best they could, making mountains of
the past--mountains so high and sheer that they could not be surmounted
in retreat.
Bonner was helplessly in love--so much so, indeed, that in the face of
it, he lost the courage that had carried him through trivial affairs of
the past, and left him floundering vaguely in seas that looked old and
yet were new. Hourly, he sought for the first sign of love in her eyes,
for the first touch of sentiment; but if there was a point of weakness
in her defence, it was not revealed to the hungry perception of the
would-be conqueror. And so they drifted on through the February chill,
that seemed warm to them, through the light hours and the dark ones,
quickly and surely to the day which was to call him cured of one ill and
yet sorely afflicted by another.
Through it all he was saying to himself that it did not matter what her
birth may have been, so long as she lived at this hour in his life, and
yet a still, cool voice was whispering procrastination with ding-dong
persistency through every avenue of his brain. "Wait!" said the cool
voice of prejudice. His heart did not hear, but his brain did. One look
of submission from her tender eyes and his brain would have turned deaf
to the small, cool voice--but her eyes stood their ground and the voice
survived.
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