her own people and take up his? Because she loved him?
Oh, that she did; yet before ever she had loved Jay Rountree, before ever she had heard of him, she had left her father's life for that lived by the Rountrees. If she were not now to marry Jay, still she would return to the city and to business. No doubt of that. Why, if what her father did was so much the better?
"Time," said her father. "Time, Ellen, to be away."
To the station, he meant; the little, snowy station in Hoster where Jay's train soon would be whistling. Oh, she had it in mind! Her father and she were to drive down alone.
At the door, Ellen reached up and kissed her father. They went out to the sleigh and jingled toward the town. Ahead to the left, under a charitable mantle of snow, stood the Dewitt's dilapidated cottage—the home which Di had left and to which she would never return, after having proved of service to Slengels in winning Metten. Di, too, had abandoned the life of her people for the city of business.
Queer that, at this recollection, Ellen felt again the draw of the city—and business. Though it had "destroyed" Di, ten times more powerfully Ellen felt it.
She was the draw of adventure, enterprise, danger! Danger, to be sure, her father well knew and endured; but his danger was of an old, patterned sort. His manner of meeting it was set out for him; he held within him patterns of courage and skill as old as shipping; as old, indeed, as physical peril and man's first impulse to save his fellow from storm and sea.
The danger from business was different—strange. No
