e with me. I've got to
make a couple of calls, and I want you along."

"You know," he was saying as he unfastened her dress for her, "after I
knew I was going to have you, and before I got you here, I used to think
so much about this very thing--the fun of having you going around with
me--doing things together. Now it seems--" He did not finish, for he was
passionately kissing the white shoulder which the unfastened dress had
bared. "Amy, dear,"--his voice choked--"oh, _doesn't_ it seem too good
to be true?"

His feeling for her had chased the other things away. She softened to
happiness, then grew gay. They were merry and happy again. All seemed
well with them. But when, on his rounds, they passed the Hollands' and
Ted waved from the porch he had an anxious moment of fearing she would
ask who that was and their crust of happiness would let them through. He
quickly began a spirited account of an amusing thing that had happened
in the office that day. His dream had been of a happiness into which he
could sink, not ground on the surface that must be fought for and held
by effort; but he did not let himself consider that then.

CHAPTER FIVE

The train for Chicago was several hours out from Denver when the man who
had decided that it was an uninteresting car began watching the woman
who was facing him from several seats away. He was one of those persons
with a drab exterior but not a similarly colored imagination, and he was
always striving to defeat the meager life his exterior consigned him to
by projecting himself into the possible experiences of people he watched
on the trains.

Afterwards he wondered that he should at first have passed this woman by
with the mere impression of a nice-looking woman who seemed tired. It
was when he chanced to look at her as she was looking from the window
that she arrested him. Her sweet face had steeled itself to something,
she was as if looking out at a thing that hurt her, but looking with the
courage to bear that hurt. He turned and looked from the window in the
direction of her intense gaze and then smiled at himself as he turned
back from the far-reaching monotonous plain of Eastern Colorado; he
might have known that what she was looking at was not spread out there
for anyone else to see.

She interested him all through the two days. She puzzled him. He
relieved the tedium of the journey with speculations on what sort of
thing it was she was thinking about, going ove