hing between you.
Matt will be almost as glad of your coming as my going. I thought we
were coming up here to reassure Sue, but I seem strangely superfluous."

"You can reassure Adeline," said Sue. She added to Wade, "I keep
thinking what an annoyance it will be to my father, to have all this
fuss made over him. I sometimes feel vexed with Adeline. Good-bye!" she
called back to him as she drove away, and she stopped again to add,
"Won't you come up with Mr. Hilary when you've heard something
definite?"

Wade promised, and they repeated their good-byes all round with a
resolute cheerfulness.

XII.

The affair had been mixed up with tea and lunch, and there was now the
suggestion of a gay return to the Northwick place and an hour or two
more in that pleasant company of pretty and lively women, which Wade
loved almost as well as he loved righteousness. He knew that there was
such a thing as death in the world; he had often already seen its
strange, peaceful face; he had just stood by an open grave; but at the
moment, his youth denied it all, and he swung along over the hard-packed
roadway thinking of the superb beauty of Suzette Northwick, and the
witchery of Louise Hilary's face. It was like her, to come at once to
her friend in this anxiety; and he believed a strength in her to help
bear the worst, the worst that now seemed so remote and impossible.

He did not find Matt Hilary in the station; but he pushed through to the
platform outside and saw him at a little distance standing between two
of the tracks, and watching a group of men there who were replacing some
wornout rails with new ones.

"Matt!" he called to him, and Matt turned about and said, "Hello,
Caryl!" and yielded him a sort of absent-minded hand, while he kept his
face turned smilingly upon the men. Some were holding the rails in
position, and another was driving in the spike that was to rivet the
plate to the sleeper. He struck it with exquisite accuracy from a wide,
free-handed rhythmical swing of his hammer.

"Beautiful! Isn't it?" said Matt. "I never see any sort of manual labor,
even the kinds that are brutified and demoralized by their association
with machinery, without thinking how far the arts still come short of
the trades. If any sculptor could feel it, what a magnificent bas-relief
just that thing would make!" He turned round to look at the men again:
in their different poses of self-forgetfulness and interest in their
work, the