but she seemed oddly reluctant to let him
go.

"Do you know that father says you have more influence than any other man
in the city?"

"That's more kind than truthful."

"And--I think he and grandfather are planning to try to get you, when
the mills reopen. Father suggested it, but grandfather says you'd have
the presidency of the company in six months, and he'd be sharpening your
lead pencils."

Suddenly Willy Cameron laughed, and the tension was broken.

"If he did it with his tongue they'd be pretty sharp," he said.

For just a moment, before he left, they were back to where they had been
months ago, enjoying together their small jokes and their small mishaps.
The present fell away, with its hovering tragedy, and they were boy and
girl together. Exaltation and sacrifice were a part of their love, as
of all real and lasting passion, but there was always between them also
that soundest bond of all, liking and comradeship.

"I love her. I like her. I adore her," was the cry in Willy Cameron's
heart when he started home that night.

CHAPTER XLIV

Elinor Doyle was up and about her room. She walked slowly and with
difficulty, using crutches, and she spent most of the time at her
window, watching and waiting. From Lily there came, at frequent
intervals, notes, flowers and small delicacies. The flowers and food
Olga brought to her, but the notes she never saw. She knew they came.
She could see the car stop at the curb, and the chauffeur, his shoulders
squared and his face watchful, carrying a white envelope up the walk,
but there it ended.

She felt more helpless than ever. The doctor came less often, but the
vigilance was never relaxed, and she had, too, less and less hope of
being able to give any warning. Doyle was seldom at home, and when he
was he had ceased to give her his taunting information. She was quite
sure now of his relations with the Russian girl, and her uncertainty
as to her course was gone. She was no longer his wife. He held another
woman in his rare embraces, a traitor like himself. It was sordid. He
was sordid.

Woslosky had developed blood poisoning, and was at the point of death,
with a stolid policeman on guard at his bedside. She knew that from the
newspapers she occasionally saw. And she connected Doyle unerringly with
the tragedy at the farm behind Friendship. She recognized, too, since
that failure, a change in his manner to her. She saw that he now both
hated her and feared h