chatter,
as though he were an onlooker before whom spontaneity was impossible.
Yet as Sunday after Sunday the two young men strode up together, she
grew to accept Ellery. First he became inoffensive; then she became
aware that his eyes spoke when his lips were dumb; and finally, when
words did come, they were the words of a friend who understood moods and
tenses. In some ways it was a comfort to have this buffer between her
and Dick. It helped to prolong the period of uncertain certainty.

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