ered, when he had taken her for granted, helped her into
her blessed little coat as coolly as he had Rose? Had it been this same
Norma who scolded him about throwing his collars on the floor, and who
had sent his coat to the cleaner with a ten-dollar bill in the pocket?

Wolf remembered summer days, and little Norma chattering beside him on
the front seat, as the shabby motor-car fled through the hot, dry city
toward shade and coolness. He remembered early Christmas Mass, and Norma
and Rose kneeling between him and his mother, in the warm, fir-scented
church. He remembered breakfast afterward, in a general sense of hunger
and relaxation and well-being, and the girls exulting over their
presents. And every time that straight-shouldered, childish figure came
into his dream, that mop of cloudy dark hair and flashing laugh, the
new delicious sense of some unknown felicity touched him, and he would
glance about the busy factory self-consciously, as if his thoughts were
written on his face for all the world to read.

Wolf had never had a sweetheart. It came to him with the blinding flash
of all epoch-making discoveries that Norma was his girl--that he wanted
Norma for his own, and that there was no barrier between them. And in
the ecstasy of this new vision, which changed the whole face of his
world, he was content to wait with no special impatience for the hour in
which he should claim her. Of course Norma must like him--must love him,
as he did her, unworthy as he felt himself of her, and wonderful as this
new Norma seemed to be. Wolf, in his simple way, felt that this had been
his destiny from the beginning.

That a glimpse of life as foreign and unnatural as the Melrose life
might seriously disenchant Norma never occurred to him. Norma had always
been fanciful, it was a part of her charm. Wolf, who worked in the great
Forman shops, had felt it no particular distinction when by chance one
day he had been called from his luncheon to look at the engine of young
Stanley Forman's car. He had left his seat upon a pile of lumber, bolted
the last of his pie, and leaned over the hood of the specially designed
racer interested only in its peculiarities, and entirely indifferent to
the respectful young owner, who was aware that he knew far less about it
than this mechanic did. Sauntering back to his work in the autumn
sunlight, Wolf had followed the youthful millionaire by not even a
thought. If he had done so, it might have been a