on the upturned face of the sleeper. He moved, murmured, "dearest," and settled back into his deep sleep; taking his hand from her arm. With a little cry she fell on him and kissed him, asking his forgiveness for the mistake between them. She put her head close to his, her lips to his lips; for she was his and yet not his—a strange division separating them, a cleavage between their bodies and their souls.
"Why did we not know?" something whispered within. But she answered herself more calmly—"It will all come right in the end—it must come right—for his sake!"
CHAPTER V
When young John Lane first came to St. Louis to work as a clerk in the traffic department of the Atlantic and Pacific, he had called on Colonel Price at his office, a dingy little room in the corner of the second story of the old brick building which had housed the wholesale hardware business of Parrott and Price for a generation. The old merchant had received the young man with the pleasant kindliness that kept his three hundred employees always devoted to him.
"I knew your father, sir!" he said, half-closing his eyes and leaning back in his padded old office chair. "Let me see—it was in sixty-two in camp before Vicksburg. I went to consult him about a boil on my leg. It was a bad boil—it hurt me. … Your father was a fine man—What are you doing in St. Louis?" he concluded abruptly, looking out of his shrewd blue eyes at the fresh-colored young man whose strong hands gripped squarely the arms of his chair.
And from that day Lane knew that the Colonel never lost sight of him. When his chance came, as in time it did come through one of the mutations of the great corporation, he suspected that the old hardware merchant, who was a close friend of the chief men in the road, had spoken the needed word to lift the clerk out of the rut. At any rate the Colonel had not forgotten the son of Tyringham Lane, and the young man had often been to the generous, ugly Victorian house—built when the hardware business made its first success.
Nevertheless, when, three years later John Lane made another afternoon visit to that dingy office in the Parrott and Price establishment, his hands trembed nervously as he sat waiting while the Colonel scrawled his signature to several papers.
"Well, John!" the old man remarked finally, shoving the papers towards the waiting stenographer. "How's railroadin' these days?"
"All right," Lane answered buoyantly. "They have transferred me to the
Indiana division, headquarters at Torso—superintendent of the Torso and
Toledo."
"Indeed! But you'll be back here some day, eh?"
"I hope so!"
"That's good!" The Colonel smiled sympathetically, as he always did when he contemplated energetic youth, climbing the long ladder with a firm grip on each rung.
"I came to see you about another matter," Lane began hesitantly.
"Anything I can do for you?"
"Yes, sir; I want to marry your daughter—and I'd like you to know it."
The old merchant's face became suddenly grave, the twinkle disappearing from his blue eyes. He listened thoughtfully while the young man explained himself. He was still a poor man, of course; his future was to be made. But he did not intend to remain poor. His salary was not much to offer a girl like the Colonel's daughter; but it would go far in Torso—and it was the first step. Finally he was silent, well aware that there was small possibility that he should ever be a rich man, as Colonel Price was, and that it was presumptuous of him to seek to marry his daughter, and therefore open to mean interpretation. But he felt that the Colonel was not one to impute low motives. He knew the very real democracy of the successful merchant, who never had forgotten his own story.
"What does Belle say?" the Colonel asked.
"I should not have come here if I didn't think—" the young man laughed.
"Of course!"
Then the Colonel pulled down the top of his desk, signifying that the day's business was done.
"We have never desired what is called a good match for our girl," he remarked slowly in reply to a further plea from Lane. "All we want is the best;" he laid grave emphasis on this watchword. "And the best is that Isabelle should be happy in her marriage. If she loves the man she marries, she must be that. … And I don't suppose you would be here if you weren't sure you could make her love you enough to be happy!"
The old man's smile returned for a fleeting moment, and then he mused.
"I am afraid it will be hard for her to settle down in a place like Torso—after all she's had," Lane conceded. "But I don't expect that Torso is the end of my rope. I shall give her a better chance than that, I hope."
The Colonel nodded sympathetically.
"I shouldn't consider it any hardship for my daughter to live in Torso or in any other place—if she has a good husband and loves him. That is all, my boy!"
Lane, who realized the grades of a plutocratic democracy better than three years before, and knew the position of the Prices in the city, comprehended the splendid simplicity, the single-mindedness of the man, who could thus completely ignore considerations of wealth and social position in the marriage of his only daughter.
"I shall do my best, sir, to make her happy all her life!" the young man stammered.
"I know you will, my boy, and I think you will succeed, if she loves you as you say she does."
Then the Colonel took his hat from the nail behind the door, and the two men continued their conversation in the street. They did not turn up town to the club and residence quarter, but descended towards the river, passing on their way the massive skeleton of the ten-story building that was to house, when completed, the Parrott and Price business. It rose in the smoky sunset, stretching out spidery tendons of steel to the heavens, and from its interior came a mighty clangor. The Colonel paused to look at the new building—the monument of his success as a merchant.
"Pretty good? Corbin's doing it—he's the best in the country, they tell me."
Soon they kept on past the new building into an old quarter of the city, the Colonel apparently having some purpose that guided his devious course through these unattractive streets.
"There!" he exclaimed at last, pointing across a dirty street to a shabby little brick house. "That's the place where Isabelle's mother and I started in St. Louis. We had a couple of rooms over there the first winter. The store was just a block further west. It's torn down now. I passed some of the best days of my life in those rooms on the second story. … It isn't the outside that counts, my boy!" The Colonel tucked his hand beneath the young man's arm, as they turned back to the newer quarters of the city.
Mrs. Price, it should be said, did not accept Lane's suit as easily as the Colonel. Her imagination had been expanded by that winter in Washington, and though she was glad that Isabelle had not accepted any of "those foreigners," yet Harmony Price had very definite ideas of the position that the Colonel's daughter might aspire to in America. … But her objections could not stand before the Colonel's flat consent and Isabelle's decision.
"They'll
