But Tom Lupton was not articulate. He walked beside Mary Vanton, sat at her table, declined cigars and apologetically lit his pipe instead, looked at his hostess and old friend with something kindling in his countenance, talked—the casual talk that there was to exchange in cheerful barter—and said nothing of what was in his heart. Yet Mary Vanton knew what was there.

The same thing was there that had been in the heart of the youngster, the boy, Tommy Lupton, she had known. It would be there always. But his attitude was different from Richard Hand’s. In spite of an existence that gave him plenty of opportunity for thinking things out there were things that Tommy never would think out. He would only dumbly feel.

If he couldn’t think them out he certainly couldn’t utter them in words. Without doubt he thought it wrong to feel them. All his life he had loved Mary Vanton just as, in a boyish way, he had loved the girl Mermaid. But he did not realize it; would have thought it a wicked thing in him if he had realized it.

His attitude was simple. Mary developed it one day[258] and defined it for her own satisfaction—developed and defined it for his unconscious satisfaction, too. He would feel the better for it, she knew, though he would not know why.

“What,” she asked him as they were walking along the ocean shore together, “are you going to do—eventually?”

Tom Lupton considered.

“Oh, I suppose I shall just stick along here,” he confessed. “It isn’t much. It’s all I have to look forward to.

“Other men,” he said, a moment later, “haven’t any special thing to look forward to, either. Take the fellows at the station. All the older ones are married and expect to retire on their pensions some day and take it easy. They’ve children. They can watch them grow up. I’m not married. I’ll probably stay in the harness as long as I’m able and then I’ll have to quit, I suppose, whether I want to or not. I can watch other people’s children growing up. I can occupy myself some way. That’s what it comes to mostly—occupying yourself some way—doesn’t it?”

“Why don’t you marry?” If it was a cruelty he was mercifully unconscious of it.

He looked straight at her and replied: “I’ve never thought of marrying.”

It was literal truth. Mary Vanton understood that instantly. He had, from boyhood, always put her clean[259] above him. He had fought for her, a boyish battle, and been defeated; and after that, while he continued to feel the same way about her, while he continued to love her, the fancy of adolescence maturing into the devotion of the grown man, he had never figured himself in the running. She had stepped outside of the circle of his life, and when she re?ntered it, it was as the wife of another man—which was the whole story.

“Of course,” he was saying, with his admirable simplicity and acceptance of the facts—so far as he recognized them. “Of course I wish I might have married. It would have been pleasanter. I should either have been much happier or very much unhappier.”

Again he looked at her with his smile in which the boy he had been was so clearly visible. When he smiled the little wrinkles at the comers of his eyes, got from much seaward gazing, made him look younger.

“I’m worried about you,” he told her, with the directness that was to be expected of him. “Do you think you ought to stay here this winter?”

“I think I must,” she answered. “It’s not from any idea of shunning people but because I have got to arrive at some way of living. If Guy were dead I could make an unalterable decision. With Guy alive I have to consider the possibility of his return, the probability of it.”

“You feel sure he will return?”

“Quite sure. If I thought he were never to return I[260] would reconcile myself to it as best I could, make my plans, and go ahead. Even then I should have to provide for the fact that he might come back. But believing as I do that he is sure to come back, and feeling as I do utterly uncertain how long he will be away, I am very badly perplexed.”

“Why do anything?” he asked, wonderingly. “It is not as if you had to earn your bread.”

“It is more difficult,” she explained. “When you have to earn your bread, and your children’s bread, you are spared the necessity............