her most cheerful manner;
but she showed, too, a kind of deference toward Eleanor, an attitude
which said, "He is yours; I am intruding only by accident." The
meaning in this attitude bore itself in, at length, even upon Bertram
Chester; and he did not fail to glow with gratitude. He expressed that
gratitude once or twice when he was alone with Kate. Somehow, it was
easy for him to talk to her about such things.

CHAPTER IX

"Are you off the job to-night?" came the resonant voice of Bertram
Chester over the telephone.

"Yes!" Eleanor laughed. "Are you coming to play with us?"

"No. You're coming to play with me. One of our best little playmates
leans over my elbow as I indite these few lines--little Katie. Mark
Heath is reporting great doings in Chinatown to-night, and he wants
assistance. Do you suppose your Aunt Mattie will object to
Chinatown?"

"Aunt Matilda never dictates--"

"Then it's Chinatown! We'll be along for you in half an hour. We're
dining with the Masters, who have inconsiderately refused to come
along. What's happened to you?"

"Nothing--why?"

"Your voice sounds so chipper!"

"That shows I'm in a mood to play!"

"Then we'll be along in a _quarter_ of an hour."

"And I'll be waiting at the garden gate!"

The swish and murmur of night, the rustle of a steady sea breeze, the
composite rumble of the city far below, tuned with the song in
Eleanor's blood as she stood waiting by the front gate. She looked
down on the pattern of light and heavy shadow that was the city, and a
curious mood of exultation came over her. Light foreshadowings of this
mood had touched her now and again during the past two months; never
before had these transitory feelings piled themselves up into such a
definite emotion.

She could not trace its shy beginning, but she was aware of it first
as a sense of the humanity in the cells of that luminous honeycomb
below, the struggling, hoping, fighting, aspiring mass, each unit a
thing to love, did one but know the best. The wave of love universal
beat so strong on her heart that she turned her eyes away for surfeit
of rapture, and looked up to the stars. They, the bright angels of
judgment whose infinite spaces she could not contemplate without fear,
united themselves in some mysterious bond with the little human
things below; the sight of them brought the same wave of rapture. Too
mighty long to be endured, the wave broke into ripples of happy
contemplation. So