Then she turned
to go.
"How long will it take you?" asked David.
"About an hour."
"All right. I will meet you in front of the par-
son's house in an hour. We will go back by train.
I have money enough."
"I'd just as soon walk." The woman spoke with
the utmost humility of love and trust. She had
not even asked where the man lived. All her life
she had followed him with her soul, and it would
go hard if her poor feet could not keep pace with
her soul.
"No, it is too far; we will take the train. One
goes at half past four."
At half past four the couple, made man and wife,
were on the train speeding toward the little home
in the woods. The woman had frizzled her thin
hair pathetically and ridiculously over her temples;
on her left hand gleamed a white diamond. She had
kept it hidden; she had almost starved rather than
part with it. She gazed out of the window at the
flying landscape, and her thin lips were curved in a
charming smile. The man sat beside her, staring
straight ahead as if at happy visions.
They lived together afterward in the little house
in the woods, and were happy with a strange crys-
tallized happiness at which they would have mocked
in their youth, but which they now recognized as the
essential of all happiness upon earth. And always
the woman knew what she knew about her husband,
and the man knew about his wife, and each recog-
nized the other as old lover and sweetheart come
together at last, but always each kept the knowledge
from the other with an infinite tenderness of deli-
cacy which was as a perfumed garment veiling the
innermost sacredness of love.
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